
This spring, I got the email every travel writer prays will, one day, wind up in their inbox. The title: "Do you have time to go to Santorini this month?" The text: "We want you to do our cover story."
Obviously, I was in.
My story on Santorini for Mariner magazine
I'd been to Santorini twice before. But on my third time there, I spent four days simply... exploring. And fell in love with the island, which—to be perfectly honest—I'd almost written off on my last trip there, finding the souvenir shops and tourist hordes at Fira just too much.
This time, I did things differently. I rented a car, something I'd never done there before (but recommend highly!), which let me get to the smaller, off-the-beaten-path towns and beaches that many tourists don't discover. I made it to Akrotiri, the Bronze Age settlement, frozen in time by the volcanic eruption here in 1,600 B.C., which had been closed both times I'd visited before. As luck would have it, it opened for the first time in almost a decade on the very same weekend I arrived.
It was also Orthodox Easter, which, if you've ever celebrated Easter with Greeks, made everything even more exciting. In Perissa, I sat with a family that owned a restaurant on the black sand beach and ate the goat that they'd been spit-roasting for the past several hours. In Oia, on a local's tip, I went to the main piazza at midnight; firecrackers and fireworks exploded nonstop overhead. One, whizzing too close, made me deaf in one ear for the rest of the night. (Between that and the scar I'd gotten a couple of months earlier from being hit by, of all things, an orange at the Battaglia degli Aranci in Ivrea, I've decided travel journalism—while not exactly war reporting—can be pretty risky business).
And I made friends, especially thanks to Craig Walzer, a Tennessee native and the owner of Oia's Atlantis Books, who took me under his wing and introduced me to many others in the town. As well as convinced me to rent a car to begin with. (Thanks, Craig!).
Some of the story's beautiful photographs, including a shot of Craig at Atlantis Books
It all gave me much more insight into the island's culture—and even more appreciation for its beauty and history than I'd had before. So I'm so thrilled to see that the story, which is the cover story for Mariner magazine's fall issue, came out so beautifully. The photographs by James Bedford are stunning.
So check it out! If you can't find Mariner on newsstands, you can read the story online here.
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