I WOKE UP with a start at and looked at my watch—7 a.m., and our flight was at 8:40! Still drunk, I woke up Joy in a panic and ran to the bathroom. My forehead felt strange, and I was shocked to find it caked with blood, with a tiny gash under my right eyebrow, and the green linoleum bathroom floor covered with dollar-size blood splashes. I vaguely recalled getting up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, smashing my head into something then stumbling back to bed, not realizing I had cut my skin. They say drunks feel no pain, and I can vouch for that!

Joy, still dazed as well, also had an episode better forgotten. She had come back to the room with me after our drinking bout with the waiter, but instead of going to bed she changed clothes and went disco dancing in the hotel club which was full of pilots and stewardesses, and in her inebriated state preached the Urantia Book to them, being the last to leave when the place closed down at 4 a.m.

Both of us had passed out with our clothes on, so we were dressed and ready albeit my jeans had several blood splashes on the leg. I had no time to clean the bathroom floor and cannot imagine what the hotel maids must have thought when they came in to do the room.

Late for our flight, we sped out of the hotel parking lot and immediately got lost, both of us pig-headedly thinking we knew the way and bickering about it as we made one wrong turn after another. From the hotel to Ben Gurion Airport was five kilometers.

Somehow we eventually found the entrance to the rental car return, which was somewhere between the hotel and the airport, and with the minutes ticking away we dropped off the car and were rushed to the terminal in a special vehicle. At check-in we were reprimanded by the official for being late and were hurriedly whisked through, the last ones to take our seats on the plane for a flight that was a blur for both of us. Not only did I have a cut above my eye, but Joy remarked that my eye was beginning to turn black and blue. What a way to end our wonderful trip to Israel!

In Athens we stored our extra bags in a locker at the airport and took a bus to Piraeus, where we booked ourselves on a ferry to the legendary island of Santorini, leaving that evening.

With a day to kill, we sat at an outdoor café along the harbor, talking, eating, drinking (not a drop of alcohol!) and watching humanity pass by, until we finally came to our senses. In some ways it was one of our best days together, and I will always have fond memories of us laughing ourselves silly over our debacle of the night before as well as many other humiliating episodes we recalled from our respective pasts.

 * * *

It was an overnight ferry to Santorini, and we had taken the cheapest cabin without a window or shower or toilet, way down in the bowels of the boat, just to have a private place to lie down. Joy immediately fell into a deep sleep but I lay wide awake suffering from acute claustrophobia once we closed and locked our door. It was like being inside a stalled elevator, and I couldn’t take it.

After an hour I got up, went to the purser's office and paid the difference for first-class accommodations on a top deck and with a porthole. (Joy was not happy that I woke her up and forced her to move!) The ferry vibrated so much all night that it was impossible for me to sleep, and each time it pulled into a new port I wondered if this were Santorini and if we had missed getting off the boat.

I needn't have worried!

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