Cover

One Summer in Santorini

SANDY BARKER

Dedication

For Ben, my very own someone

Chapter One

I woke suddenly, and even though I was forty thousand feet in the air, I already felt jet-lagged. You know that unique mix of queasiness and exhaustion? That.

I hate long-haul flying. Wait, let me correct that, I hate long-haul flying in economy. Flying across the world when I’ve been upgraded to business class is awesome – I highly recommend it. But this wasn’t one of those times.

I checked my watch. I had slept for five hours – if we’re calling it ‘sleeping’ – more like ‘dozing upright’. Either way, I felt achy and groggy. I yawned a big, ugly yawn, the kind I usually reserved for solitary moments – one of the few benefits of sitting in a cabin full of people I’d never see again.

I stretched my neck from side to side and pushed my palms into my eye sockets. My eyes wanted to be anywhere else, and I didn’t blame them. I dug around in the seat pocket for my eye drops, tipped my head back, and irrigated my eyes with soothing coolness. Resting my head against the seat, I longed for a bed – any bed. I just wanted to lie flat so I could stretch out my stiff muscles. I certainly didn’t want to be cooped up with all those strangers, sitting in a ridiculously uncomfortable seat, breathing that stale, nasty air.

Yup, I’d definitely woken up on the wrong side of the plane.

Still, irritable was better than anxious. For weeks, I’d been fighting mini panic attacks about the trip, and that wasn’t like me. I’d travelled quite a lot and was more than capable of handling whatever catastrophe came my way. In fact, catastrophes had become such a regular part of my travels, I was starting to wonder what I’d done in a past life to piss off the travel gods.

One flight to Melbourne was cancelled outright. A flight out of Chile was delayed for so long I had to sleep on the airport floor. There was a hotel reservation in Florence that disappeared, and while I was arguing with the manager, my iPad was stolen from my bag. Not forgetting the time my whole suitcase somehow vanished between Sydney and Auckland. On the next trip, my new suitcase emerged a mangled mess on the baggage carousel – hello LA and, yes, fellow passengers, those are my knickers, thank you very much. And I barely recovered from a raging case of malaria in Peru. Okay, so it wasn’t actually malaria. It was salmonella, but it still knocked me on my bum for five days when I was supposed to be hiking the Inca Trail.