Hua Hin is Thailand's royal beach resort and home to the king's summer palace. The local food is fantastic, the weather is beautiful, everything's cheap and the Thai people are so friendly and warm.
I don't have time to have friends come and stay, except on weekends in Maine. I invite a lot of people to come to Maine.
Most people in Georgia have a place in the hills for when it gets too hot in the city. We have good friends who own a place by a beautiful little river and the houses are full of hammocks.
We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.
We always spend the summer together. My wife and kids, we always go back to Massachusetts and spend the summer there near where my wife and I both grew up. I wasn't willing to sacrifice the summer to go elsewhere.
I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage.
I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails. So it's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my life...which is so hard to find.
I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That's good time. I have a couple hobbies. I'm a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer. We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We've been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It's really isolated.
In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski.
In 1987, when I was 19, I was studying musical theater at Boston's Emerson College. My sister, Tricia Leigh, told me about a summer acting retreat in Italy. Mom paid, so off we went.
