From Sea To Shining Sea Part 2: A Wine Dark Sea

Blue.

That’s the thing I remember most about our time on the boat. Not just the type of blue, but the utter amount. But we’ll get to that.

If you’re just joining us, we’ve finally boarded Le Jaques Cartier (French for “Jack’s Luxury Watches”) and are getting settled in anticipation of a week cruising the Greek isles, guided by Smithsonian historians.

Thanks to Beth’s Parents’ (heretofore known as “Jim and Peggy”) booking adjoining rooms for the whole family, we had a lovely view out the port (nautical for “left”) side of the ship, with a cute little balcony on which we sometimes had our morning coffee. Our room was generally lovely. Efficient in a way that never felt cramped, but with enough storage to let us unload our bags and not worry about them again until we were ready to pack up again at the end.

As I said before, I’d never been on a cruise ship before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, despite some initial assumptions. What I’d come to realize over the coming week was that some of those assumptions would be somewhat inaccurate, and some would be spot on.

There is a certain amount of understated excess. You’re greeted with a photo session not unlike the DMV, so everyone can take the night to memorize your face and spend the rest of the cruise referring to you by name. You’re immediately shuffled towards an “embarkation tea” that is actually an “embarkation champagne and scotch.” It is implied that the staff exists solely to cater to your every whim, and that there are very few restrictions as to your behavior short of anything that breaks actual maritime law. Most people are eagerly anticipating the part where they are to be catered to, and in some cases that’s meant literally.

But first, the safety drill.

*sigh.*

OK. So you know how in a group project, there is always one person who refuses to contribute, and assumes everyone else will do the work for them and not notice their lack of participation? Every single one of those people joined us on Le Jaques Cartier for our safety drill.

It wasn’t a complicated project: go back to your cabin, get your life vest, put it on, go to a specific location so we can count you. Wait until we have everyone, then let’s all get crunk on champagne and cocktails while the crew sets “sail” for Patmos.

What should have taken ten minutes took the better part of an hour, and was accomplished with the maximal level of adult foot stomping, “surely they don’t mean us”s, and four specific folks just deciding “no” and needing to be tracked down in their cabins, before we could all be let loose upon the unsuspecting (or rather: probably very experienced at knowing the appropriate levels of expectation) crew.

I can’t properly remember whether the crew orientation was before or after this, so let’s call it after for the sake of narrative, and if I’m wrong then we’ll call it creative license. Either way, it took place at some point and that’s when we found out that while the ship was sailing under a French flag, the captain was three children in a trench coat.

“I have twenty years of captaining experience,” he squeaked, his voice still changing from puberty, and his cheeks red where facial hair would one day grow. The other two children wobbled underneath him, looking for all the rest of the world like he was shifting back and forth on his feet, but we knew it was simply the lowest child getting tired. Thus having been lied to about the age of our adult supervision, the cruise director came back out to ensure we knew we could always count on him to bring 30% more energy than was ever necessary, all the time, day and night. Please head to the dining room to enjoy dinner.

Thus far, every one of my assumptions was being proven true. But then a funny thing happened that night: I looked away.

At some point on a ship, you can’t help but look out. And when you do, you see a vast, almost unending amount of water. And sometimes, that’s all you can see. But even if you live somewhere where vast amounts of water are just a short drive away (such as Los Angeles, just to pick a random example out of a hat), there are moments where you stop seeing it through the familiar lens that we all put over our daily experiences and commonalities.

That first night, I stood in the open air at the back of the ship, scotch in hand, and watched the sun set over the water. And standing there, seeing all land disappear beyond the blue of the Aegean Sea, I had a very philosophical moment.

It’s difficult to express the disconcertion of how flat the horizon line actually is when everything you can see is just … water. I can understand entirely how it drove sailors crazy seeing it days, weeks, months on end. Never appearing to change or shift. Because you look in any direction - sometimes finding a spot with an unobstructed 360 degree view - and it remains the same. Giving no indication as to your progress across the ocean, or the earth. The sun may move above during the day, and the stars may move at night, but when all you see is water, it feels like you’re lost in a vast and never-ending blue. Whether you powered up the engines, hoisted the sails, or sat gently rocking in the shifting waters of the Aegean, your point of visual reference would remain the same: lost in the infinite eternity.

The modern world has been mapped and GPSed down to the centimeter, but there’s still some power in the sudden realization of experiencing something that still holds so much mystery and power. This place upon which we “sail” - is so vast, huge, unyielding. Potentially punishing. So grand as to feel infinite, and entirely unaware of us as individuals or a collective ship - something which inevitably makes you feel small and insignificant. Where you could disappear in a moment, and be lost and forgotten the moment you sink beneath the surface.

There is something very human about the choice to make this place where we deliver an experience designed to make everyone feel like the most important person in the world. That atop an environment where we are insignificant, we sail a ship full of captains, where even the captain acts in deference to the mass of customers.

And standing there on the back balcony, scotch in hand, fully aware of the sheer power and grace of the infinite ocean, I decided I wasn’t sure we could trust three eight year olds with that level of responsibility.

Patmos

Day two brought us to Patmos. But before that, it brought us the true majesty of the Aegean.

I said it before, but the thing that sticks the most in my mind is the color blue. Specifically, the radiant sapphire that spreads evenly across the Aegean in all directions. This was the morning we all first saw it. And almost to a person, we brought it up to each other at breakfast: have you seen it? Go outside. Isn’t it incredible? Can we go look again right now to make sure it’s still there?

The color was simply unreal, and I would spend days trying to finally capture the exact shade that encircled us for the entire trip. [Ed note: I did, in that photo above. And I know I did, because as I was flipping through the hundreds of photos I took looking out at the sea, Beth walked into my office, stopped, pointed at my monitor, and shouted “That’s it!”]

The day’s excursions to Patmos were bifurcated into religious and artistic. For those interested in religion and/or history, Patmos is the location of The Cave of the Apocalypse, where John The Apostle (or maybe just some guy also named John - it’s somewhat in dispute) went after being exiled from Roman civilization, lived in a cave for two years, and emerged with the fever dream that is Revelations.

Here I’ll quote Wikipedia, because I don’t want to risk being accused of heresy when history will suffice: “It has been told in Christian tradition that the rock inside the cave was shredded, and through three thin openings, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, he heard a loud voice in his head instructing him to write down what he saw in a book…”

Having already spent twelve years of my life being read passages from Revelations (and wondering why the readers were always skipping so many other books of the Bible), I decided that maybe the “Photographing Patmos” tour was more my speed. But if I’m being totally honest, this was possibly my most anticipated tour of the entire journey.

Okay, if you know me at all you know I take a lot of pride in two things: my words and my photography. And travel is the most wonderful excuse to combine the two (hence…well, this fucking thing right here…) I joke that I’ve been writing since I was a zygote, and taking pictures since I could hold a camera, but in the latter case it’s almost true. I don’t remember the first camera I ever had, but I know it was early enough that some of my first memories included my parents letting me wander around with a little point and shoot.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t own a camera. And I don’t just mean “on my phone” - when I went down to Argentina on exchange at 16, I brought an SLR and three lenses. I bought my first digital camera on a whim in San Francisco (it could hold 50 whole photos on a single memory card!) I’ve owned a couple Canon DSLRs over the years, and would have sold my soul for L glass lenses at one point. Along the way I’ve developed a passion for photographing landscapes and architecture and cityscapes, exploring textures, and whether it’s vast or intimate, for desperately trying to finding the framing to make you feel here with me in this moment.

So for my 40th birthday I splurged on a Sony full frame mirrorless A7R III body, and three stupidly expensive lenses. It’s 42 megapixels of fully manual controlled, RAW not JPEG, hold on let me grab my big lens, watch me open the aperture and get that sweet sweet bokeh, photographic joy - all contained in a single backpack. So obviously I brought it on this trip. And obviously I signed up for the Photographic Patmos excursion. And obviously I fucked up my camera settings so that every photo was two stops too dark. And obviously I didn’t discover this until I was back in the US.

*sigh* (again.)

As much as it pained me, photos aren’t memories - just facsimiles of them. And I didn’t need photos to remember when it looked like to wander the little alleys, or to bask underneath the giant vistas where the windmills turned slowly atop the hills. Or to crest a ridge and see the vast blue below. I still have those, even if only a few of my photos were salvageable. It wasn’t the only lesson about the temporary and fragile nature of things that I would learn in Patmos, but we’ll get to that in a bit. First: we’re gonna meet some friends.

Yes, Beth and I have a habit of meeting people on vacation that we then end up remaining friends with across the years (and oceans) but this wasn’t that. In this case, one of my clients (who had quickly become one of my friends) had recently bought a house on Patmos (unrelated to our trip.) We’d found this out a month or so before leaving, and it just so happened that he’d be there with his family at the same time our boat was docked on the island. So we decided to disembark from our luxury cruise ship to meet up with some friends in Greek Isles - like you do.

Eric was generous enough to take a few hours out of his day to show us around the small town he lived in, named Skala. Patmos is a small island, with roughly 3000 people total, most of whom live in Skala, and it turns out that small beach towns have much in common, whether Greek or Californian. So we got the grand tour in a total of forty five minutes, with his kids pointing out their favorite sweets shop, Eric being stopped by his neighbors every forty feet to say hello and share the day’s news/gossip, and a full overview of every local shop, restaurant, and laundry. At one point we went to “the good pie shop” just because it was open - an apparently sporadic occurrence regardless of the time of year - and got the chocolate pies because “they don’t always have them.” Five pounds of chocolate pies (which are more like chocolate spanakopita in nature), Eric also showed us the house he’d just bought, and we grabbed lunch and talked all about his plans for the next year, Greek bureaucracy and island living issues notwithstanding.

It was quaint, and generally lovely. And honestly just kind of a fun thing to have been able to do in the middle of our vacation. Let’s meet up in your island home, and let you show us the good pie shop.

All Aboard was set for 5pm, and we were back on the ship for happy hour and dinner. The horn sounded, and we waved goodbye to Patmos from the side of the ship. This was our first departure where we weren’t in group project purgatory, so some of us gathered at the side of the ship to lean over the side and see how this behemoth maneuvered away from the dock. As we watched the engines churning away at the water below, the wind kicked up, and my hat flew off my head - down into the water below.

No, not my hat. My mom’s hat.

Let me back up a bit.

Mom’s Hat

After my mom passed, we went through her clothes to decide what to give away, and to whom. A woman of excellent taste with a mild tendency towards hoarding, there was … quite a lot to go through. However as she was just a hair over five feet tall, there wasn’t much for me to consider beyond the idle “huh - mom had great taste in shoes … and sometimes bought in triplicate.”

Let’s just say that Beth was the primary beneficiary of this particular project.

But in amongst her things was this beautiful white Chanel straw hat with a black hatband. Something of a cross between a fedora and a porkpie, I originally put on my head as a bit of a joke, but damned if it didn’t fit me. And damned if it didn’t look good. So over the years, it had become one of my summer go-to hats. It was lightweight, it breathed well, it kept the sun out of my eyes, and whenever I put it on I had a small little memory of mom, and silently thanked her for her excellent taste.

But that wasn’t what I was thinking as I watched this hat whip off my head and flutter away. I was intensely aware that it wasn’t just a hat, but it was *my mom’s hat* - and as such, it was irreplaceable in that specific manner of its provenance. But disregarding my feelings entirely, the wind carried it forward nonetheless, and I watched it hit the water and slowly amble back along the starboard side, bouncing off of the side of the ship just above the water line. And then as one of the crew tried to fish it out with a conveniently placed fishing pole (likely for this exact kind of circumstance) I watched as my mom’s hat was sucked underneath the ship and pulled into the propellers.

I stood there for a moment in shock. It all happened so fast and then so slow. The man one deck below with the fishing pole looked up at me, shrugged, and mouthed an apology. I nodded a thank you for his efforts. And then I turned around, and leaned back against the railing, trying not to cry, and feeling very silly for crying over such a small thing as a hat.

But isn’t it true that some things are more than just things, but vessels for memories? Of places, of feelings, and of people - tangible objects which bring us instantly to some association? Isn’t that why we collect souvenirs and take photos? Isn’t that one way we help ourselves to recall that which once made us feel something - joy, contentment, awe, fear, love? Are those objects not indelibly connected to those moments, those places, and - crucially - those people?

Maybe.

Maybe they are connected. But these things that connect us are not those moments. Or those places. Or those people. The things are just the bridge. They are that which transports us to an emotion or a memory, but that emotion and memory remains regardless.

Because they’re just things - in a very literal sense, they are the things we leave behind. Both mom and me. It was my mom’s hat, but it was also just a hat. It didn’t make her more or less proud of me or make her love me any more or less, and losing it didn’t make me lose any memories of her. It was just a hat that she decided to take home one day, and which I later found. But it was just a hat nonetheless.

And if by some chance I’m wrong, and the things we leave behind are imbued with some element of us that implants in them some small manner of our essence, then now a little part of mom gets to spend eternity exploring the Aegean. I’m okay with that - and I think a small part of her would be okay with that too.

Rhodes

Day three brought us into Rhodes, and on a trip that could very broadly be described as hot, Rhodes was really hot. Really really fucking hot. Our tour guide said it was the hottest spot in Europe that day, and when I did the math on the C to F conversion, I found out that it was 105 with 85% humidity. Which is, objectively speaking, awful.

From our room though, we couldn’t see the heat or the humidity. What we could see was the medieval city of Rhodes sitting proudly just across the harbor, with the more modern city further out. A walking tour of old Rhodes was Beth’s destination for the day. Mine was the Acropolis of Lindos, a two hour bus drive away.

If you’ll allow me a break in the narrative here, I need to pull you out of that time, and into the moment when I’m writing this post several months later. I’d written much of my experience on Rhodes while on the bus back from Lindos, tippy tapping notes and thoughts and ideas into my iPhone as is my habit, wanting to capture my feelings and thoughts as they felt in the moment. I was in a slightly whimsical mood, and feeling a little playful. But a few days after we left, that heat led to devastating wildfires breaking out across Rhodes. The island’s largest ever firefighting operation took place, while 19,000 people were evacuated from the path of the fires. Thankfully no one was killed, but lives and livelihoods were destroyed. Generations of homes were lost. History too. And it doesn’t feel right to be whimsical about the time I spent there just before. So if this bit sounds a little tempered, that’s because it is. Back to the show.

I saw most of modern Rhodes from inside of a bus, and most of ancient Rhodes maneuvering between tourists just as sweaty and cranky at the abundance of tourists as me. It’s a slight shame, but also a bit of a byproduct of this particular kind of traveling setup: we see one city a day, with some amount of guided experience and some amount of free time to explore it on our own. But there’s no way to see it all. Not in the few hours we have on land before shipping off again that night. It’s a tasting menu of travel - morsels divvied out for your amuse(bouche)ment. And I love a good tasting menu, but if you’re looking for a ribeye entree, that’s not on the menu.

In some ways - maybe most ways - it’s not fair of me to find something lacking for what it was never meant to be. But Rhodes was the place where I first realized I wanted to spend much more time there than would be allowed. That I was being shuffled back to the boat just as I started getting a sense of what I wanted to explore. Nonetheless, I have some breathtaking memories of the time I was there. And if our meal at Lalique in Crieff has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes small bites can still make an unforgettable meal.

Cattle Calls and Castle Walls

Once our bus dropped us off next to a dozen other busses, I was very quickly reminded that we were tourists at a tourist destination. The route up and down to the Acropolis required navigating narrow paths lined with a hundred thousand stalls selling everything from soccer jerseys to greek pottery. And once you get there, you get to stand in line behind the population of a soccer stadium just to get in. But once you do, and once you make your way up through the ancient castle and to the acropolis itself, you’re greeted with an incredible sight.

The acropolis on Rhodes stands high above the island, looking over stunningly rich green and blue lagoons, and wrapping the landscape around itself. Bleached white pillars stand just a few feet from the edge, which drops off down sheer cliffs to the sea. It feels like you’ve discovered something unseen by man for centuries - something Indiana Jones would discover. You just happened to do so with four hundred thousand of your closest friends. You stand there and look out to the sapphire sea, the deep emerald green lagoons, and the white coral just below the surface, and you think “of course this is where they built the acropolis - it’s as close as mankind knew to heaven.”

Not being great with crowds, I did find myself wandering off and away from the chaos. And in doing so, I found a couple private moments of very simple pleasures: petting one of the island cats (this would become a commonality of the trip, and while I didn’t keep an official tally I expect I pet somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty cats across Greece); eating an ice cream while wandering the hot and crowded narrow streets; listening to the languages spoken by each group as they moved up and down around me. I will also admit to being kicked out of a private cafe while seeking a photo of an ancient wall and mosaic in the back. I might not be able to return (see also: the country of Brazil), but I did get the photo, so let’s call it even.

Back on the boat, we had a couple hours to kill, so Beth offered to give us the abridged walking tour of the ancient city. Being that she was dressed as the spitting image of Ellie Sattler, and thus conveyed a substantial amount of confidence, we appreciatively obliged. To her credit, she remembered much of the information which was given to her earlier that day, and communicated it well to all of us. Photos were taken, snacks were procured (beers too), stories and history were divulged, and then as it somehow continued to get hotter and hotter though the afternoon, I decided that enough was enough. I was tired of being hot. I was tired of sweating. I was tired of feeling every part of my clothing as it sealed itself to my body. So I walked right out the gates of the ancient city, across the road, down to the sea, and I kept fucking walking until the water was over my head.

The sea was probably 80 degrees, but that was 25 degrees cooler than the air. I lay there for a few moments underwater, just letting the sea pull the heat out from every part of my body, and hearing the twin sounds of the water lapping the shore and old German men applauding what was obviously a spectacle they would tell other people about later that evening. But as we squelched our way back to the boat to get ready for dinner, I had no regrets.

50, 12, and 8x3

That evening was a triplicate celebration. First, it was Jim and Peggy’s 50th wedding anniversary - the entire reason we were all aboard this journey in the first place. Second, Beth’s nephew Blake was celebrating his 12th birthday, and we had a surprise party planned (after telling him that no, nothing would be happening today, because the parents’ anniversary had to take precedence - something he accepted with an admirable amount of grace and maturity.) And by coincidence, it was also the Captain’s dinner and cocktail party - a weekly occurrence of semi-formal revelry that was obviously an event the whole crew looked forward to.

The night of celebrations went off without a hitch. Blake didn’t realize we had something planned until the cake came into the room, and his eyes lit up with recognition and joy. Then we all suited up (or the female equivalent) for the Captain’s dinner, and our own semi-private celebration for Jim and Peggy. The chef even sent over a surprise dessert to help with the celebration.

I have a very distinct memory of watching the sun light up the sea through the windows of the dining room, seeing little rainbows through the mist thrown up by the boat, and feeling very, very happy and content. We were surrounded by family we loved, eating excellent food, and celebrating the kind of milestones that are always worth celebrating. It’s possible that this sort of contentment is the very reason people choose this sort of experience to make memories. It’s also possible that I get sentimental with wine and revelry. Regardless, that moment felt very special, and just celebrating that moment could have justified the entire trip all on its own.

The same could almost be said of the daughters’ nine-month-long Mission Impossible style heist to secretly create a slideshow celebrating Jim and Peggy’s lives. This was a plan hatched last Thanksgiving, and executed across a number of visits thereafter. Over the course of several months, the three daughters had secretly purloined a bevy of old photographs from throughout the years (including one time where Beth called me while actually hiding under a desk at night because her mother had gotten up unexpectedly), scanned them using equipment that was in no way shape or form connected to any professional environment any of them worked (*cough cough*), and put together something which celebrated 50 years of life, love, and laughter, all across the world. After dinner, we were escorted to a very cool private lounge underneath the waterline and (after more than a few technical issues) the final product was shown to the parents, resulting in many tears and just as much laughter.

All in all, it was a night of celebrations worthy of that premise, and justified every iota of effort that resulted in getting to have that evening, there, together. (Even the parts where we nearly died.)

Santorini

Day four brought us to Santorini. If, when thinking of Greece, you picture white adobe style buildings with lovely blue roofs hanging cliffside over the mediterranean, you’re picturing Santorini.

There’s something almost artificial about how gorgeous it is. Oía (pronounced: incorrectly) in particular is just stunning in a way that really threw me off. For the first hour there, something about it felt disconcerting, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then suddenly it hit me: the whole city was perfect in the way only movie sets can seemingly create. There was none of the black discoloration from rain that you see in any other city, or smudging on the sides of buildings from children playing nearby. There was no litter, or gum on the sidewalk. Nothing to spoil the experience. There was just white and blue. It was Disneyland’s Main Street, on a Greek cliffside.

But the thing about beautifully crafted cities clinging artfully to the side of sheer cliffs overlooking the sea, is that you need to actually get up the cliffs to experience them. Cue: The Bus Ride Of Terror. Remember that bus in Athens? A fucking cakewalk in comparison. One lane switchbacks with 180 degree curves would be difficult in any vehicle - indeed, we saw motorcycles that had to three-point-turn their way through some of the turns requires to get up these cliffs. But we weren’t on motorcycles. We were in a full sized bus. Like a touring bus. On a road so narrow that when you looked out the side, you couldn’t see road even if you pressed your face up against the window. All you saw was sea - and at times, the bravest cars and bikes in the world passing on one of the straights, close enough that you could reach out and tousle their hair. (I didn’t. I wanted to, but I didn’t.)

A hundred turns later, you crest a hill, and the island of Santorini sit there, perched on a plateau a thousand feet above the sea. A wine cork bobbing in the Aegean. But why though? What made this flat topped island with sheer cliffs?

Yeah … about that.

So a long time ago, the islands of Santorini and the neighboring five islands were just one big connected island called Thera. It looked like like a normal island, where it rose gradually from the ocean until it formed a peak. And there wasn’t a big circular hole in the middle.

You might see where I’m going with this.

Around 1600 BC, the volcano underneath Thera erupted. It was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in known history. The eruption was so violent that the caldera instantly turned that one large island into a semicircle of several now-much-smaller islands, each of which now had thousand foot cliffs on three sides. The 500 foot tall tsunamis resulting from this eruption are theorized to be the historical basis for the mythical destruction of Atlantis. This eruption in the Aegean Sea was so large that it was noticed and recorded as far away as China, and the layer of ash it distributed around the world now serves as a core archeological marker to date other civilizations. Those who lived on the island, the Minoans, left nothing behind but but the rubble of their civilization. Nothing larger than microbes survived.

Eeesh.

Heavy.

But the volcano’s no longer active, right?

Weeeellll…

Around 79BC, a new eruption created a couple new islands, and as recently as 1950 new lava formations were creating new land. So it’s only active if you consider “periodically it will erupt and dump magma from the mantle of the earth into the sea, and/or create lava domes that rise hundreds of feet into the air” to be “active.”

So yeah. There is no why or how or purpose for why this town should exist today in the first place, let alone exist in such breathtaking beauty, beyond a desire to create something beautiful from which to see more beauty. It’s audacious in a way that I can’t help but respect. In a place where the earth itself will periodically threaten to erase the entire island from existence, they will clutch to the side of a cliff and enjoy the view. And almost unfathomably, I want to join them.

Listen - I know it’s stupid. The sun alone would kill me. There’s no drinkable water. It’s impossible to get here, or to go anywhere else once you have. And yet, there is a version of my life where once there, I never leave. Where the tiny roads and impossible cliffs and bright white Adobe structures become my home. I thought to myself: “it is beautiful beyond compare here, and I am in love.”

And then, right when I was most vulnerable, they gave us wine. The utter audacity of these motherfuckers.

Dionysus Twiceus

More specifically, we were brought to the very first industrial winery on the island. It was originally built in 1949, deliberately placed at one of the highest parts of the island, and then built to allow gravity to do much of the mechanical work of moving liquid from place to place. Genius.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m somewhat smitten with wine. While I’d blush at being called a “connoisseur,” I’d probably heartily agree with being called “damned opinionated.” I’m also in the process of deliberately trying to learn more about wine. To expand my horizons and my knowledge base. To appreciate more than just “Napa Cabs and Italian reds, alongside the occasional Argentine Malbec.” I’ve spent the past couple years purposefully and deliberately going outside of what I’m familiar with, so when offered a tour choice between “hike an active volcano in the summer heat” and “be driven by an air-conditioned bus to a winery” I chose the latter (as did Cory and Meg, due to their excellent taste and culture.)

I know next to nothing about Greek wine, but I felt like I had a good basis of general wine knowledge to compare and learn from. I’ve been drinking wine since I was 12, and it’s become a hobby and interest throughout adulthood. I’ve got a couple books about global wine varietals, a couple winery memberships, my brother worked at a winery for several years, and I may or may not have spent an unhealthy amount of time working on the business model for a winery that I play to own and operate one day.

That’s all to say that while I might not be a sommelier, at the very least I know the basics - things like “grapes grow on vines.”

From where we were at the top of the island, the view was only out towards the sea, and behind us was nothing but little shrubs going off into the distance. So when one of the hosts came around to pour our first tasters, I asked: where is your vineyard? She looked at me, confused. I unnecessarily continued: “Is it around here, or on another part of the island, or…” I trailed off, as she gestured her hand outward, indicating that they were everywhere around us. And I turned to look, seeing no vines or vineyards or anything that could conceivable grow grapes of any kind. And that’s when I was informed that Greek grapes don’t grow on vines. Seriously. They grow on squat little bushes that look like the tops of pineapples, and pull water from deep within the limestone. And we had been absolutely surrounded by them for half the drive up here.

Coolcoolcool, so turns out I know nothing about grapes, or wine, or anything, and fruit can just come from rocks or whatever.

Existential crisis aside, it was an interesting experience. Unfortunately, while the view was stunning and the host was interesting, it wasn’t the best Greek wine we had on the trip. A big part of that was the environment, and a bigger part was the weather. I just don’t think the winery was set up to have 50-ish people unload on them for wine tasting, because each pour took roughly 20 minutes to get from “put wine in glass” to “explanation of wine.” And in the 100+ degree heat, that meant we could choose between waiting and drinking hot wine that was well explained, or ignoring the winemaker and drinking chilled wine with no information. We were polite the first two glasses. We stopped being polite when we drank hot and tannic red wine for the third glass.

After the winery, we needed food. So it was rather convenient that this coincided with lunch time. We’d been coordinating with the volcano hike crowd (Beth, Katy, and Katy’s family), and were going to meet up at a town roughly equidistant from us both, in a restaurant that had been recommended to us called Dionysus. Thus coordinated via intermittent group chat, we rode the bus back into town, took a brief walk through the center of Fira, dodged tourists and Germans alike, and took our time ordering cold beers and hot plates. Which is right around when Beth, Katy, Brad, and The Nephews showed up angry as hell, sweating profusely, and smelling slightly of donkey.

Their tour had dropped them off at the old harbor on a different part of the island, and in lieu of busses to the top, there was a choice between waiting in line for several hours to catch the gondola, or hiking the roughly mile long donkey path up the cliffside. They chose the donkey way. The murderous look they all had upon arrival, and the insistence that everyone be absolutely silent and ask no questions until they had drinks in hand, told us all we needed to know about how that choice had worked out.

Lunch was the kind of negotiation that happens with any group larger than two, as we tried to figure out whether another trip to Oia was worth it, who would come, who would go elsewhere, and who would find other activities to pursue before heading back to the boat. Split off once again, Cory, Meg, the nephews, and I wandered Fira in search of a very specific dessert that we were told was only found here (we didn’t find it here) and for places to take more photos.

What we quickly realized was that Fira was THE tourist town on the island. If the luxury boutiques hadn’t given it away, the hours spent packed into crowds would have. What we later found out was that four other ships, each of which was nearly 10X our size, had offloaded their passengers to Fira for the day. Eventually, overwhelmed by the oppressively increasing heat and the crowds - we gave up our quest for the elusive dessert of dreams, settled for plain old gelato, and shifted our goal to making sure we had time for the coldest shower old Jackie Watches could give us.

Time was not on our side in this endeavor. The boat back to our ship only ran once an hour, and we were pressed for time to make the next one or wait in the heat below for another hour. Thus we would have our own excursion down the donkey path, as we desperately tried to make the 3:30 boat back to the ship. 583 (actual number) very slippery, tilted, unevenly spaced, donkey soiled steps later, we’d arrive at the old harbor absolutely, completely, monumentally drenched in sweat, just in time to find and catch our boat back home.

Conflict in Santorini

I ended the day a little more conflicted about Santorini than I started. I loved wandering the streets of Oia, and taking a hundred photos of the various ways it sat hanging opulently and arrogantly above the water below. Sure, there were crowds, but nothing that overwhelmed. And most importantly to me, the city had its own sense of identity beyond simple tourism. There was a feeling that real people lived there, and that we were visitors passing by real lives in situ. Those lives were surrounded by stunning architecture unique to the area, and purpose built for the unique existence there atop the cliffs, but that life would continue almost identically after we’d left and gone back to our ship.

Meanwhile after my (very long, very cold) shower I happened to glance out the window of our cabin and saw the three different ten to fifteen story cruise ships for whom Fira is built. Fira felt like Beverly Hills and Hollywood Boulevard transposed the narrow streets of a Grecian town. Nothing found there felt unique, aside from the historical architecture, and everything felt catered to tourism. Which sounds more judgmental than I intend it to.

There is value - to the community and to the visitors - in tourism. Hell, tourism likely propels 80% of the economy of the island, so of course things are built with that reality in mind. But there’s something inauthentic about tourism-focused spaces that never sits right for me. I’m less interested in the well constructed veneer of a drive by experience, or endless replications of the same Instagram post with different faces, than I am in that which originally brought people here dozens or hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Show me your lives, not your marketing. Or at least lean towards it. Don’t file off the edges in the name of the perfect social media post; I would rather see your tired and your poor than the huddled masses yearning to replicate a story from three months ago.

Later that evening, sitting on the back of our “tiny” ship, watching the sunset light up the striated hills of Santorini, and feeling the hot wind in my face, I decided that I want to write a murder mystery set in Oia. Call it A Murder in Santorini, or something similarly Agatha Christie-esque. There’s just something about the bright whitewashed buildings and perfect sea below that lends itself to counterpoising seedy operations just beneath the surface.

And because I’m such a stickler for making sure a location can be a character unto itself, finding this seedy underbelly amongst the beautiful white and blue buildings might require three to four months of very intense hands on research. In person. Oh well.

Tomorrow we hit the back half of our island cruise, and I overthink the history of Greece. Shocker, I know.