But it is once more time to move, because on every trip to Greece there is one island I always visit, and this time I haven't been there yet. That island is Santorini.

Among the Greek Islands is a group I call the classics—the classic period, in my book, dating back to the 1970s, when many of the airports were built. Because airports made them accessible, these are the islands that have become the most developed, the islands even people who know Greece only vaguely can name, and where first-time visitors are most likely to go.

There's beach-endowed Mykonos, whose reputation is for being gay-centric, but in reality is tolerant of just about everyone except cruise ship passengers who insist on eating every meal aboard. And Corfu, Venetian in much of its architecture and British in many of its sensibilities. (Toast, the Brits in Corfu will argue, and the Greeks will disagree, is not a slab of cheese between two slices of bread thrown on the grill.) And Rhodes and Crete, with too many big hotels, to be sure, but worlds enough of their own that in some of the mountain areas of Crete, for instance, even Greeks from the mainland are considered foreigners.

One of the most developed is Santorini, a volcano whose shattered cone, with a string of hotels, bars, and restaurants along its edge, has created drink prices that get even the most happy holidaymakers to think about slowing down. It is an icon of travel, and one of the first Greek islands any visitor should see. Whether you love it for its natural beauty or its liveliness, or hate it because everyone else trying to find the same dream has made it too commercial, your experience will form a baseline by which to measure all the other islands.

I love it. In my view, overcharging for drinks is an acceptable transgression for people who live every day with the knowledge that sooner or later another devastating earthquake, like the one in 1956, will send their white-cube houses tumbling into the sea.

I love Santorini even more when I am sitting on my terrace at the Astra Apartments & Suites, in the village of Imerovigli, where my wife and I first talked of marriage and, later, our nine-month-old daughter was delighted by her first Greek Islands morning.

Santorini has more than three hundred and fifty hotels, dozens lining the edge of the caldera and creeping down the side of it. The Astra, once a good little hotel with blue curtains and rustic wood furniture, has evolved into a great little hotel with designer flair. I sit on my terrace, filtering the last rays of the evening sun through a glass of white wine. From almost a thousand feet above the sea, I look out at the caldera, whose violent formation may have been the source of the myth of Atlantis. I am awestruck, as I am every time, by its overpowering beauty. There is no intervention by man, not the encroachment of more white cubes along the caldera's lip nor the coming and going of ferryboats in the basin far below, that could detract from its majesty.

I would be content, I think, to sit here forever. But then I spy a ferryboat, its streaming white wake as thin as gift-wrapping ribbon, heading out to sea, bound for Crete perhaps, or Rhodes, or any in the long string of islands between here and Piraeus.

Stay or go? I ask myself, watching the wine turn shades of gold. It's like trying to decide between a dessert made by your mother and one by your father.