While most of the SeaDreamers hunkered down in their cabins, I took a four-hour tour of the famous walled city. I walked the old walls with mobs of tourists from Australia and the United States, peered into the ancient dungeons, and visited an open market by the cathedral, where farmers were selling items they'd brought down from the hills. There were bundles of wild onions, big wheels of quince, and bags of figs and candied orange peels. I bought a jar of homemade marmalade to have with my lunch, and took it back to the ship, where the SeaDreamers were sprawled around the pool in different attitudes of torpor and relaxation.

As the journey progressed, the boat seemed to have a lotus-eater effect on its occupants. The longer people stayed on board, the less they wanted to leave. Indeed, many people never seemed to disembark at all. The Schleiffs said that they'd met a couple from Syosset, New York, who slept every day until two in the afternoon. Then there was Steve Bell, a genial gentleman from Ontario, whom I only ever saw in the dining room or at the blackjack table, nursing a large goblet of cabernet. Bell was on a first-name basis with the entire crew, and referred to himself and other veteran SeaDreamers as repeaters. "This is cruise number nine for us," he said over a dinner of lamb chops and slivers of Croatian truffle. Once upon a time, he and his wife had toured Europe by car, but no more. "We did two weeks on the yacht once," said Steve, grinning a thin, slightly dazed grin. "You know what? It wasn't enough. By the end of the trip, we were ready for three."

That night, the sea came up, pitching my bed gently to and fro. I had fitful, storm-tossed dreams about driving my parents' car into a wall, then falling, from some great height, out of an olive tree. But the next morning, as we cruised past the bare hills of Albania toward Corfu, I began to see what Steve meant. I had a breakfast of waffles, fresh lychees, and green tea, and then visited the spa, where one of the Thai ladies in attendance administered the Minty Foot Massage (at forty-five dollars, by far the cheapest of the myriad treatments). When we docked in Corfu, I bought my knockoff sunglasses, then joined my off-road tour and drove up into the hills through stands of ancient olive trees.

"Olive trees, olive trees—they're never ending," said our guide, Marilena Rouva, as she gunned her sporty red Jeep around the tight little turns. Rouva told us that she had lived on Corfu all her life and was the mother of three. As a devotee of the great Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher, she was also adept at keeping up an informative patter while driving at top speed. There are a profusion of cricket clubs on Corfu, thanks to the British, she said, and the houses are all painted in festive colors (as opposed to the Aegean's ubiquitous stark white), thanks to the Venetians, who occupied the island for almost six hundred years. "Unlike the other islands, we also have trees on Corfu," said Rouva as we sped merrily along. Compared with those famously barren, windswept islands, she said, Corfu is a kind of Eden, filled with palm and pomegranate trees, and even a sizable cash crop of kumquats.