Photo: Our three adorable grandchildren

From Ephesus, Greece, we took a short ferry ride across the Aegean to meet up with our daughter Lee and her family in Greece. We spent two weeks together on the islands of Samos and Patmos, on each of which we rented a lovely vacation home and enjoyed getting reacquainted with our grandkids (ages 10, 13, and 15), whom we don't see often enough since they live in Augsburg, Germany.

While on the isle of Patmos, we visited the cave where the apostle John is reputed to have written Revelations, the last book in the Bible. One evening while eating gyros at an outdoor café there, Art overheard a guy at a neighboring table mention Howard University, his alma mater. Art, being Art, didn't hesitate to initiate a conversation that ended with the affable guy giving Art his email address and phone number scribbled on a napkin; when Art later Googled him, he turns out to be one of the wealthiest men in Turkey!

The first morning we were on Patmos, we were ambling down the quay looking at the boats in the harbor when we happened upon a pretty cutter-rigged sailboat with a "for sale" sign on it. For both of us, it was love at first sight. "Sherpa" was the right size and, although made of fiberglass, has the classic wood boat feel that we were looking for.

The owners, Greg (Canadian) and his wife Tomomi (Japanese), had recently quit their jobs, sold or left behind most of their worldly goods, and hurriedly evacuated themselves from Tokyo to their boat to avoid the nuclear fallout raining down following the earthquake that damaged the Fukushima Power Plant. We discovered that Greg had owned the boat for 12 years and had single-handedly sailed Sherpa across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, where they had lived on it for four years and more recently sailed it for a couple of months each summer.

We ended up sailing back to Turkey with Greg and Tomomi in order to buy the boat there. This turned out to be a lengthy process that involved having the boat hauled out for an insurance survey, getting the bill of sale notarized by a U.S consulate in a town three hours away by bus who was rarely open for business, deregistering the boat with the Canadian authorities and getting it documented with the U.S. Coast Guard, hiring an agent to obtain a Turkish sailing permit on our behalf, etc. But at last we're the proud and happy owners of Sherpa!