From Sea To Shining Sea Part 3: Notes From Some Small Islands

Amorgos Among Us

As morning broke on Day 5 and strode across the island of Amorgos, the schedule of the trip had started feeling more like an obligation than a respite, and I wanted to just take the day off from excursions. So after everyone had breakfasted, filled their water bottles, put on their hats and sunscreen, and ventured out into the great unknown, I sat on the open air patio at the back of the boat and read a book. A whole book. One that I had been meaning to read this trip, but hadn’t had the chance to open until now. Cover to cover.

It was, honestly, an excellent way to spend the morning. As far as I could tell, I was the only passenger still aboard the ship, and did my best to stay out of the way of the rest of the crew. Every now and again someone from the expeditiously attentive staff and I would lock eyes, both of us would silently communicate that there’s no need for further interaction beyond that, and we’d both get back to whatever we were doing prior.

Partway through her excursion, Beth suggested that I come ashore and meet her for lunch, so I jumped into the shore boat just after 1pm and we wandered up and down the small seaside town of Katapola that made up a majority of the population of Amorgos. This particular setup seemed more common than not on the little islands that dotted the grecian Aegean - one “big” port city (population: a couple thousand people), and then a handful of other small towns and groupings scattered throughout the island. Beth regaled me with the story of her excursion, which had included visiting people in their homes and learning about the traditional villages on the island. I mmm-hmmed along, both genuinely happy that she had enjoyed it so much and genuinely happy that I had chosen not to experience it myself, because as much as I touted “show me your life here today” in prior entries, walking into a stranger’s home for the experience takes a little too far for personal comfort.

After a solid ten minutes of walking along the shoreline, we realized we’d seen all twenty restaurant options in the town, and for lack of any other decision making methodology, chose a restaurant called Yakamos Amorgos solely because it had the highest google review (“4.9 stars - in this economy?”) There’s some level of irony in the later realization that this ended up being one of the most memorable meals we had in all of Greece. Chosen almost at complete random, and completely empty when we got there, we didn’t have the highest of hopes or expectations for anything beyond “we left no longer hungry,” but this place blew us away and stayed with us all trip.

Now, even taking into account that the cephalopods just hit different in Greece (which is a weird sentence to write, but absolutely true) one of the best dishes we had all vacation was during this lunch. Called salatouri, it’s basically a salad made with sea skate (think: stingray, but chibi) sprinkled with olive oil, and mixed with chopped parsley, onion, dill, pepper, and lemon juice. It was so good that I’m annoyed we didn’t find out about this dish until Amorgos, because I would have ordered this at every opportunity.

Coupled with this unexpectedly incredible fish salad was a local carpaccio that was to die for (and which we did actually order seconds of) a fava bean dip that was sort of like a hummus if hummus was primarily intended to be used as garlic transport, and some of the meatiest thicccboi sardines we saw in Greece. We also made the mistake of ordering a couple fresh cheeses, because we thought we might want some fresh cheese. I only call this a mistake because what came out was roughly three pounds of cheese, and while we generally do enjoy cheese in portion sizes best described as “abundant,” we left roughly two pounds of cheese behind.

Suffice to say: we recommend the joint. Yakamos Amorgos - look it up if you’re ever on Amorgos, and then order the salatouri.

Several hours later, satiated and settled up from lunch, Beth had a shop she wanted to show me. One of the things she had experienced on her excursion was a local drink called “Raki.” Raki is a sort of lower alcohol brandy digestif, and a local delicacy. Conveniently placed on the water right where the boat was to pick us up, she had found a store selling Raki from the local distillery - because even on remote Grecian islands, the first rule of business is still location, location, location. This store conveniently had a little tasting setup just in case anyone ended up wandering in and needed some convincing. Beth was fascinated with the drink and wanted to both show me what it was like (indeed, she spent a good portion of lunch describing it), and maybe bring a few bottles home as gifts. So we shuffled into the shop and asked if we might have a sip or two to taste.

I have often found throughout this trip that Greeks are, as a whole, a remarkably accommodating people. So a half hour later, we’d tried not just every bottle that had been set out for tasting, but literally every bottle on sale in the store, and some that weren’t. Even just by asking what something was, or how it differed from a similarly-labeled bottle, we would get a full description of it, tasting notes, and then she would just grab the bottle off the shelf and open it for us. Twice we asked a question about one bottle that was just opened, and she disappeared into the back to get another bottle, just to pour us something else in comparison in order to make her point. We knew walking in there that we were going to buy a bottle anyway - Beth had found it interesting enough on her excursion that she thought it might be a fun gift for a friend - but after what was somewhere north of a dozen 2oz tasters of Raki, we bought two of the best bottles in the store. It cost us thirty seven dollars total. So we bought a half dozen smaller bottles for friends as well. (Economically speaking, Greece was wild y’all.)

Dicks and Delos

Day 6 brought the excursion Beth had been looking forward to all trip: Delos.

Delos isn’t an inhabited island, but rather one of the largest and most complete archaeological sites in Greece. There are thousands of ruins, partial buildings, statues, and other assorted archeological ephemera, and along with being a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is one of the largest sources of information we have on the lives and livelihoods of ancient Greece. Which is why, as the archeologists joked, no one lives on Delos except the researchers and the cats. The part of Beth that still wants to grow up to be either Ellie Sattler or Lara Croft had been itching all trip for this, and she reveled at the opportunity to wander throughout the site, guided by experts, hearing all the stories of what this building was, why it was where it was, and what we’ve learned from it.

But I didn’t plan to do that.

I didn’t plan to do that at all.

I, instead, chose to guide myself, wander freely throughout an archeological site, and take photos of things I didn’t understand. (Oh, and the lions, because everyone’s heard of the Lions of Delos.)

If I’m honest, I know I missed a ton of history. I passed by a couple groups, and the experts were extolling the fascinating origins and meaning of this rock-ish thing right here. And that might sound derisive, but I mean that entirely authentically - much of Delos can only be understood by those who have spent their lives learning about it, and those who have built this skillset can turn virtually any building, column, rock, or complete absence of something into a deep and complex narrative of vivid cultural and historical understanding. But I missed out on all of that, and part of me really regrets that.

On the other hand, some of the best photos I took all trip were on Delos, and wandering freely had been my plan all along. Free of any understanding of the layout or purpose of any particular building, I set my sights on finding the most interesting elements to put a frame around. I played a lot with depth of field to show a line of columns, or highlighted a single flower growing out of the ruins of a long abandoned home. I placed myself atop hills to ensure I could give a simple pot the contrasting background of the deep blue sea, and I zoomed in so far on marble that I could see the deep cracks of grain across the veins. I captured the ocean, and the ruins, and both at the same time. I chased textures and feelings and contrasts and shapes and colors. And I saw some truly giant dicks. With appropriately huge balls.

Oh, did I fail to mention that before? Greece is obsessed with dicks. From the moment we hit Athens, we never stopped running into dick bottle openers, or carved wooden dicks, or big dick hats, or dick jewelry, or dick paintings, or dick novelty keychains. Usually thick veiny ones too. And not in sex shops - at every tourist destination and cute little town square in every city we visited. It was kind of a thing. Not something we were expecting, but one we quickly realized was going to be omnipresent no matter what island or port we visited.

But nothing topped the dicks of Delos.

We had a hard out at Delos that day. (Ed note: insert rimshot.) The hundred plus degree heat had begun shutting down some attractions around Greece, and our tour guide was concerned Delos would be one of them. So we hit it early, but had an 11am final boat back to the ship, otherwise we’d be left behind. The flip of this though was that today we’d be seeing two islands in one day for the first time on this trip.

Enter: Mykonos.

The Myths of Mykonos

Every country has the city that most embodies everything it wants to be. What it considers the best version off itself, all in one neat little locale. Mykonos is that for Greece. It’s why it has the reputation it does, and it’s why it costs what it does. Is it any better than any of the other islands we visited? Not really. And in many ways it’s much worse. But it has a reputation for being the island to go to when you want to party and spend money and generally be beautiful around other generally beautiful people.

And for all of that, it lived up to its reputation. I am not cool enough or rich enough or good looking enough for Mykonos. Everyone was beautiful and tanned (and Australian for some reason.) And everything was chic and expensive and laden with heavy expectations. But I mostly just found Mykonos crowded and exhausting.

The only plans we had for Mykonos were to hit the beach in the afternoon and have a nice dinner. That’s it. Beth and Katy had identified the right beach and how to get there, so we made our way to the bus stop only to find out that it was the wrong bus stop because it only served a different brand of bus, so we’d need to hike across town to find the right bus stop, which wasn’t really a bus stop so much as it was just a bunch of busses parked next to some other buildings - which was all in all a very authentically Greek experience. And once again we had the millimeter levels of clearance through the town that had started to become de rigueur (though more than once, one of us Americans made an involuntary noise as we barely missed brushing the side of another vehicle, building, person, or hill.)

The beach itself was beautiful, but a zoo. And most of the beach had been taken over by a tourist trap scheme where restaurants and bars placed beach chairs in every possible space from the buildings to the water, and charged somewhere between 75 and 120 euro apiece to rent them for the day - plus a two drink minimum. Considering we hadn’t had a meal that cost 120 euro on the trip yet, this felt even more egregious than it reads. The people running this scheme were rude and pushy as well, shouting that maybe you were too poor to afford Mykonos if you declined to be robbed at beachpoint. We decided instead to make our way further and further down the beach into the small corner that was set aside for “free sand.”

In the moment it was annoying, but in retrospect the whole thing put a bad taste in my mouth for Mykonos as a whole. What certainly didn’t help was just the sheer number of people on the beach. Ironically, the water was where to go if you wanted some space; compared to the several hundred people on the beach at any given moment, there were never more than 40 or 50 people in the water on the entire beach. So that’s where we spent the most time, trading turns watching our things and drying off as best one can in 90% humidity.

After a couple hours of swimming, snorkeling, ball tossing, and just staring out at the water, we were all ready to check the box marked “did this” and move on. For the Howells, that meant making their way back to the boat. For us, that meant making our way into town and finding a restaurant that Beth wanted to go to. It had been recommended somewhere, but had a reputation as being one of the better spots on the island for fresh fish.

Remember what I said about Greek restaurants existing in some sort of Schrödinger-esque superposition of everywhere and nowhere all at once? This was one of those, except as we got closer and closer, we realized that Google was showing us a seemingly impossible location. What began with us circling the block several times and never getting any closer to the pin on the map while each telling the other some variation of “hold on, let me try” in an increasingly annoyed tone, was solved when we finally looked up from our phones to find big handmade signs hanging off of buildings showing us the way down the hidden alley to the restaurant. (Which really does feel like a metaphor for something, but I don’t know what.) What we found at this Greek Brigadoon just after 7pm was an empty restaurant, a bored server, and once again maybe a little concern for our choice.

One again we needn’t have worried. For two reasons. First, and most importantly, because the food turned out to be excellent. And I’ll get into that in a moment. But secondly, it turns out that Google - unable to deal with singular restaurants existing in multiple separated locations simultaneously - had just averaged out the various spots and dropped a semi-triangulated pin in the middle. Due to our circuitous route getting there, we’d stumbled upon the furthest outpost in this restaurant - the Forward Operating Base for fish, if you will. When we left, we walked the other direction and discovered that beyond our little alcove, the restaurant continued doing brisk service down the street inside of a little a building, and the upper part of another building (but not the lower part), and another small bit around the corner, with several other different restaurants interrupting it along the way. Such is Greek life.

As I mentioned, the meal was excellent. They specialized in “come inside and pick your fish and then we’ll grill it for you” but we trusted the waiter to go nuts, and ordered the “oops all seafood” dinner option where the chef just picked whatever he felt like and grilled it alongside the fish. Thus we had a whole mackerel, the best grilled octopus I’ve ever had (again: the cephalopods just hit different in Greece), six shrimp each the size of California lobsters, calamari, mussels, and some roasted potatoes just for whimsy. Oh, and this little undressed salad in the corner that obviously no one there expected us to eat and was simply presented for instagram color calibration. We also let the waiter pick a bottle of wine to go alongside - with the only specification being that it be Greek wine - thus enjoying a lovely and mineral-forward white wine that paired with everything really well.

For dessert, we asked a simple question that has yielded wonderful results when we travel: “what’s your favorite?” And that’s when we discovered Galaktoboureko. Don’t bother trying to pronounce it (we did, several times - much to the waiter’s amusement), but if you see it on the menu, point at it and get one. I genuinely don’t know why everyone is obsessed with baklava, now that I know galaktoboureko exists - imagine a croissant if it was also flan. It’s rich and crispy, buttery but also with that lovely milk custard texture and deep flavor. In a word: incredible.

And to finish the meal, in true Greek fashion, we had a giant veiny glass dick filled with cinnamon Raki. As you do. When in Greece… (This will NOT be part of the photo collage below, but lemme know if you want me to DM you a pick. It’s … impressive.)

We knew the boat wasn’t leaving until 9:30pm, so we paid early but took our time coming back from dinner. Walking and weaving our way through town as the shops shut down and the nightlife spun up, I was more interested in getting a clear view of the lingering sunset across the water.

Mykonos didn’t thrill me with its loud and crowded summer party vibe, but there was something wonderfully charming about our back alley dinner. Sitting there in a quiet alcove, drinking white wine, hearing the waves lap the shore just a block or two over, and seeing the shadows lengthen along the rooftops as we slowly picked at a platter of seafood - that’s the Mykonos I enjoyed and will remember most fondly. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back - it may not be a place made for forty somethings who don’t know who the hottest DJ in the Aegean is right now - but I did enjoy the evening we had.

There Are No Waves In the Aegean Sea

That night we were lied to.

Earlier in the trip we were told with some amount of confidence, that our journey would always be smooth because there are no waves in the Aegean. So imagine our surprise that night as navigating the ship started to resemble the hallway fight from Inception. And lest you think my predilections towards narrative hyperbole are being exercised here, we were warned via ship-wide announcement from our overly excited adult supervision that the winds were whipping up, and the seas that evening might be a little rough. What our perpetually smiling, bingo-pushing friend failed to mention though was that our fourth floor cabin would spend much of the night swaying several feet from side to side, or that our bed would start to feel like a hammock.

And whip that wind did - we got to watch exterior doors be tied closed with ropes after the wind pulled and slammed them open; we saw full sized deckchairs slide across the decks like hockey pucks; and we saw whole sections of the exterior be battened down or brought inside to keep from becoming a brand new coral reef below. While none of us got seasick (or at least none of us got seasick enough to tell the rest of the group) the whole evening was slightly nauseating. I’ve been on rougher boat trips for sure, but those were small boats on the open ocean. It was hard not to reconcile how much larger the waves needed to be to pitch this objectively huge boat around like a kids toy in the bathtub.

But there was also a moment that night where a profound sense of awe came over me. I understood why older civilizations worshipped the sea - it feels both infinite and intimate. If this is the world you knew, for as long as recorded memory existed, of course you would understand its power as something so much larger than yourself. Life giving, but also violent and unforgiving. Powerful, and worth worshipping. We came from the sea and what else is there upon this planet if not the sea, and the smattering of islands wrought from below through beautiful catastrophe? That night felt like a reminder that water is actually the dominant state of matter on the surface of the Earth, and us land-dwelling folks are the anomalies. And also a reminder that if that water seeks to remind you of its command over the surface, there is little stopping it from doing so. In that moment I felt so small, and in the presence of something so huge. So beyond me. So much larger than myself or my problems or my anxieties. The forces that move and destroy continents, and upon whose grace my life depends.

Also, I watched a guy that I intensely disliked (long story, but goes back to my mom’s hat) drunkenly bounce back and forth off the walls of the hallway like a pinball stuck between two bumpers, and if that was the sea gods requesting my affections and worship, they earned it by giving me that moment.

Nafplion

Day 7 of our cruise was the final full day aboard the ship. It began early as we slid into Nafplion (which is giving my spellcheck absolute fits) just a little after sunrise. As I turned over in bed to gaze out the window, and looked past our balcony, I watched a floating castle slide by in the middle of the sea.

Yep, you read that right - but the way you double checked that sentence for literary accuracy was how I felt glancing over from our bed and seeing castle turrets surrounded entirely by water.

Turns out that’s a thing Nafplion is known for. I know I take a lot of pride in making sure my words paint a picture, but let me just drop a picture I took instead to illustrate:

So yeah. That’s a thing that exists in the world. Not just the setting of a fantasy novel. That’s a thing people made and that you can see with your own eyes.

The heat had once again pushed all of the excursions forward, so the only reason I woke up at all was because Beth was getting off the boat at 7:15am to make hers. The rest of us looked at the schedule, all sort of decided “nah,” and planned to figure it out ourselves. Which is how Cory, Meg, Katy, Brad, the nephews, and I found ourselves hiking up a fucking mountain.

It began when we decided to explore the town around the port. Not with any particular goal in mind, just a good old fashioned wandering. But that led to us noticing the fort high atop the hill. And then trying to find the right stairs to lead us to the fort. And then severely underestimating how many steps would be required to get us to the fort. And then discovering that the bottom of the fort and the top of the fort were at two very different elevations.

Cory and Meg, being Very Outdoorsey Colorado Types,™ were unfazed in every way by this gentle climb up a mild hill. The Nephews looked like they’d lost a water balloon fight. I was somewhere in the middle, letting my hat collect all of the excess perspiration I wasn’t using at that moment, so that it could pour down my face as soon as I took it off for a photo.

But in the end, we made it. All of us sweaty, some of us grumpy, but none of us left behind. And as we looked down over the town, we saw … fucking Italy.

Wait no, not actually Italy - the mountain wasn’t that tall. But the whole town certainly looked like Italy. Lovely little terracotta roofs topped buildings and arches and windows that echoed the seaside towns and rural villages I’d seen all over Italy.

There’s a good reason for that, and it’s actually connected to the floating castle above. While Nafplion has … shall we say exchanged hands several times throughout history (most of Greece has, if we’re being honest) much of the town itself was built when it was owned by the Venetians in the early 1600s. The Venetians also built the fort, called “Bourtzi.” (Sounds Italian, no? It means “Tower.” Very creative, those Venetians.) Because of this frequent Under New Management: Grand Re-Opening situation, the castle was built as a defensive fort, placed in the center of the harbor and lined with outward facing cannons, in order to protect the town from further siege. It mostly worked. But the result of this back and forth between Turkey, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire is a mix of architectural influences that pervade the city and create almost tree rings of architectural and cultural influence. From the Old Town, time echoes outward, moving in stages increasingly towards our own. Until you get gelato shops and Starbucks and museums with exhibits about when that wasn’t the case.

But standing there atop the mountain, it looked for all the world like Italy.

Turn around, and you’ll see the sea, again, some more. The hill we were standing on was part of natural outcropping, so the fort moved out to the point, and either side was wrapped by water. To the left, a natural bay curved around, and to the right sheer walls rise up to meet the fort. We took as many photos as we could, but despite being surrounded by water, the air stood still and humid, and the heat began to get to all of us. Plus, we had one last fancy dinner to get to (and we’d promised Blake gelato) so we made our way back to the ship to shower, change, and get ready.

I’ll Have The Veal

This final dinner was a semi-formal dinner, the sendoff dinner, and one last chance to get fancied up on the fancy boat. I had been waiting all trip for this occasion, because I had packed a special outfit for this very evening.

If you’ll recall, one of the things I wanted to do when we were in Scotland was to get a formal dress kilt made with my family tartan. Which I did. My hope was to wear it at Christmas, for reasons not entire memorable at the moment (but which I remember being held very strongly at the time at which it was ordered.)

However what was originally going to be 10-12 weeks became much longer when I got an email that included the phrase “unfortunately one of our two kiltmakers passed away from old age” and let me know that I’d be waiting a bit longer. Which - yeah, fair. Take your time. I didn’t get to wear it at Christmas like I’d planned, but I knew there were two formal dinners on this cruise, so I knew I’d have at least one opportunity to rock the family tartan.

This was something Beth and I put some considerable effort into - traditional dress kilts are both heavy and bulky, so it necessitated some packing logistics. Additionally, I needed to find a sporran and other accoutrements that I felt comfortable with. I knew I didn’t want to wear it the first night, because that was specifically Peggy and Jim’s night to celebrate, and I didn’t want to wear anything that pulled focus away from them. But the sendoff dinner was just a formal dinner with no particular other celebratory weight beyond “let’s celebrate that no one fell overboard.” So it had been hanging in our room’s closet, unbeknownst to anyone in the family except for Beth, just waiting for this final formal dinner.

Two things I figured out really quickly while wearing a kilt on a cruise:

First, while I’d been told that women love a man in a kilt, the truth is that traditional kilts are only truly beloved by elderly British men. I got five separate compliments from non-family members while wearing the kilt, and all of them were from British men above the age of seventy.

Second, despite being open air garments, traditional kilts, being worn with a coat and vest, are not a warm weather garment. Wearing twenty pounds of wool tartan, I started heating up pretty quickly. And while the ship’s air conditioning kept things mostly comfortable for the typical tourist getup of a t-shirt and jeans, it wasn’t enough to cool down something made for Scottish winters. At one point Beth asked how I was hanging in, and in a moment of honesty I told her “I’m pretty fucking miserable right now.” To be clear: I’m not sad I brought it and I’m not sad I wore it - but I am sad it was a hundred degrees when I did. I am also very, very glad that I wore underwear.

Beyond that, dinner was a little bit of a celebration, and a little bit of delaying acceptance that we would soon be returning to the real world. The ship broke out the truly good wine, the cocktails and scotch flowed freely, and even the crew got into the celebratory action a bit. Really, the only hitch in the evening came during the fourth course, when when Blake found out what veal was. He looked at us all in absolute disbelief, and continued to repeat the words “baby … cow?” with a level of skepticism that indicated he was slowly revising an initial assumption that the entire ship was playing a collective prank on him. Blake then exclusively referred to us as “you monsters” while we enjoyed the remaining several courses of dinner.

To be clear, though: the veal was excellent.

Golden Cracks

Our disembarkation and the final day in Athens are best left undescribed, save to note that we were all a little sad to go, and I (following vacation tradition) got sick. Granted, everyone else eventually got sick too (NOT COVID, thankfully) but the final day in Athens for me was a sinus infection induced blur. We hit up a pharmacy to request all the drugs they could legally sell me, shuffled around a museum, ran some last minute errands for gifts, herbs, and other assorted vacation items to be declared at customs, and argued with American Airlines in my hotel room about why the suddenly rebooked second leg of our flight back home would be leaving us stranded at JFK overnight. (Because of last minute airline cancellations and rebookings, we were simultaneously booked on too many and too few flights, somehow, and it only took a 35 minute international call and three separate supervisors plus one very patient but increasingly exasperated customer rep to sort out. Whee.)

As I said, none of it worth discussing in detail. But what is? What are the things that stand out in my mind? Well, they’re a little two-fold - split between the experience of the cruise itself, and the time I spent in Greece.

I think in the end, I enjoyed the cruise. I’ll state again that I wish it was a little more leisurely, but I understand that’s not how these things work, nor was it an expectation of anyone involved except me. But the reality is that after eight islands in a week, the details of each island start to bleed together. The excursions start to bleed together. Was that marble pillar on Rhodes or Santorini? Was that temple in Amorgos or Patmos? I have a thousand date stamped photos (truth be told, I have closer to 1200) and true to experience, I used them to reconstruct my trip and remind myself of the specific when’s and hows and where’s of the journey in order to write this here travelogue essay. But when I think back to a specific memory of a moment or an image, I often can’t tell you where it took place within the week, and I think the somewhat rushed nature of our time in any specific location is partially the cause of that.

I think my ideal cruise would be one which begins excursions around 10am, finishes by 2pm, and doesn’t expect you back on the boat until midnight, so you can spend the evening wandering whatever city or island you’re presently exploring and maybe grab dinner ashore if you want. Or maybe there are overnight excursions that let you spend a whole day and night in one location before moving on.

Some places and moments do stand out. The houses in Oia, clinging to the sides of the cliff. The acropolis in Rhodes, rising elegantly and powerfully above the island and the sea below. The blue of the ocean off of Delos. A simple, quiet grilled fish dinner and a bottle of wine in Mykonos. Laughing, crying, and celebrating with the family. And those moments are the ones I cherish.

I remember how there were friendly cats everywhere, and I tried to pet all of them. I remember how Greece never figured out what to do with greens, because every time we ordered some they were cooked to within a millimeter of their structural integrity. I remember our cabbie counting his receipts, eating a sandwich, and maneuvering a stick shift through the heavy traffic chaos of Athens, with motorcycles on either side - and realizing that between everyone involved, I was the only one stressing out about this particular situation. I remember an ocean of sapphire stretching out to the horizon.

In many ways, the moments that stand out do so i spite of the cruise activities. Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy being catered to - I joked one night, as my final drink was being brought to me, that I could feel myself becoming more of an asshole. But I have discovered I very much don’t like being “served” in the manner a butler or an international crew will initially lean into. We developed a rapport with some of the crew that was much more informal, and I felt much more comfortable in that environment.

But I think the cruise - and perhaps all of Greece itself - was the gravity around which we all orbited. It was the reason, not the thing. The reason was for family to spend time together. The reason was for family to make memories together. The reason was for all of us have an excuse to just be, together, somewhere. And in doing so, create moments of joy for and with each other. Every single day I have some moment with someone in the family that sticks in my head. Some are big, some are small, some are emotional, or hilarious, or heartfelt, or innocent, or almost incongruously mundane. But all are moments I treasure from the time we spent together island hopping through the Aegean.

Despite all of this, I feel like I did get a pretty good sense of what Grecian life was today. Greece is perhaps fundamentally broken in many ways that cannot be fixed, and in some ways that shouldn’t be. It’s a little like Kintsugi - it’s impossible to ignore the broken bits, but with the right frame of mind the cracks from use can make it even more beautiful. And I fell a little bit in love with it all, as I often do while traveling abroad. Because how could a civilization going back thousands of years not have cracks? How could it not be broken, repaired, broken again, changed, discarded, and rebuilt anew? What are cracks and imperfections, if not the history of how something came to be, today. Each crack and line and imperfection tells the story of its provenance, and the provenance of its owner. But to deny beauty for being imperfect is to deny the history and life that led to that beauty as well.

I’ll be candid that I wrote some parts of this conclusion on the island of Nafplion - or rather, looking out at the island of Nafplion from the back of the boat, having skipped the morning’s excursion. Instead of seeing a monastery, I drank coffee and stared at a cute little Mediterranean coastal town, with a beautiful fort atop a mountain and city walls, both of which I knew nothing about. At the base of all of them is modern Greece, wrapped around its past - grocery stores, and cafes, and battlements, and marinas with yachts, and a thousand steps leading up a mountain to a defensible fortress, and real estate offices, and scooter rentals, and IT services, and … everything. Life. Life amongst the ruins. And as I pull all of my notes and thoughts together several months later, I remember that moment too - one of simplicity and peace and tranquility, but one that brought me to a better understanding of what Greece is today for those who live there.

I remember distinctly our Santorini tour guide telling how civilization on the island was eradicated by the volcanic eruption. How those who lived on the island, the Minoans, left nothing but the rubble of their civilization as they fled, and that no animal or plant life survived what came next. The island remained uninhabited for nearly a thousand years as life moved on.

But it did. And civilization returned.

That is, in many ways, the history of Greece. Of a place and space with a history of over 10,000 years. Where cultures have risen and fallen and risen again anew since humanity had cultures to do so. Where what we now call Ancient Greece had their own studies and catalogues of cultures and peoples that rose and fell thousands of years before. Where the modern world wraps itself around the ancient once again, as before, the latter serving as both background to the locals, and as novelty to the visitors. It is a lovely place. And if I take nothing more away from it than the rich color of the sea and the knowledge of an infinite depth of history, then I return filled up, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

But I did get to take something else away: a hundred thousand small, unique moments with family. Each their own story, memory, picture, and comedic tale to be retold over dinner (or in front of prom dates.) And all the more special in some ways because they weren’t what we would have chosen. These are moments and memories that would have passed us by, had we not opened ourselves up to saying “yes, please.” In many ways, I find them even more special because they could have so easily been lost in the winds and whims of circumstance.

28 hours after we left the hotel, we were treated to a hazy landing back in Los Angeles. Sapphire was replaced by grey and white - the steel ocean, and the hazy white sky above. We had six days to prepare for the second half of our trip: following our found family down to South America, where we would celebrate 50 years of life in Cartagena.

But like a Marvel film, we’re going to sequel tease that particular adventure, so you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow…