There was a guided tour of the island Athenians call their St-Tropez, which is home to as many as eight hundred churches and shrines, our new guide told us, most built as private chapels by families whose men had perished at sea. The fishermen's houses are mostly vacation homes now, and by law they are painted white. Most of the SeaDreamers disembarked to storm the designer boutiques in the main town, but a few of us took a bus to the northern side of the island, which was as dry and blasting hot as any desert. We visited a monastery with a dim, beautifully ornate Byzantine interior, toasted one another with ouzo in a café overlooking an empty village square, and gazed across the water at the birthplace of Apollo—the island of Delos, which, legend has it, is moored to the ocean floor with strands of diamonds.

With its chalk-white buildings and shaded, fragrant gardens, the island's main village, also called Mykonos, was probably once quite beautiful. But in summertime, roughly a million visitors flood in, causing conditions to deteriorate. That afternoon, a giant cruise ship had disgorged a rabble of tourists, all babbling in Eastern European tongues. They washed through the crooked little streets like so many schools of fish, and as the trinket shops and cafés began filling up, I beat a hasty retreat to the ship, to eat a club sandwich in the cool of my stateroom.

And that's where I stayed, since the wind blew all that afternoon and into the evening. Beyond the harbor, someone said, the ocean swells were perilously high. Late that evening, the captain decided that "for the comfort of the guests" we wouldn't be going to Santorini after all, but would stay in Mykonos another day. The decision was greeted with dismay by the crew, who view the picturesque volcanic cliffs of Santorini as the grand finale, a fittingly theatrical conclusion to the carefully scripted seven-day itinerary. "Pulling away from Santorini at sunset, with those cliffs in the background," one of them told me wistfully, "ahh, that's the ticket." But we SeaDreamers were unfazed. We shuttled back and forth to the jewelry boutiques in town, or sat around the pool, hunkered low to keep out of the wind. "I don't know what it is," said Peggy Schleiff, as she hunkered among them. "I think they put Dramamine in the soufflés."

There were no tours offered on the final, abbreviated day of my great European cruise, so I enjoyed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and lamb chops, then headed unsteadily back to Mykonos to see what I could see. Usually travel energizes me, but after six days in the SeaDream cocoon, I was feeling addled and pleasantly sedate. I thought it might be a good idea to rent a motor scooter, but the man at the Avis counter dissuaded me. "The driving on this island is crazy," he said. "Half the people don't have a license, and the other half are drunk." So I stood in line for a taxi for over an hour and then rode across the island to a windblown beach called Kalo Livadi.

The narrow bay was flanked by bare hills lined here and there with old rock walls designed to keep the parched earth from falling into the sea. The air smelled of smoke from a nearby garbage fire. On the beach, groups of plump Greek tourists reclined under thatched umbrellas, sipping iced coffee and rising occasionally to play haphazard games of paddle ball in the wind. I thought about going for a swim but decided instead to sit in a restaurant overlooking the surf. I ordered a lunch of tomato salad and fresh sea urchin spread with olive oil on crunchy squares of toast. I drank a cup of coffee and looked out at the beautiful azure sea. The waiter drifted by and introduced himself as Christos. "Cruise ship?" he asked. I shook my head and gave him a slow, lotus-eating grin. "No," I heard myself say. "I'm sailing on a yacht. I'm on vacation with some very rich friends. We leave for Athens tonight."