Happy I went. Happy I’m back.

I SWAM IN THE LUSCIOUSLY REFRESHING MEDITERRANEAN just a week ago. It was warm and sunny in the Peloponnese region of Greece.

And when I returned to Center Island on Sunday, the weather forecast for the week included the “S” word. I’m not talking about sunshine.

Yes, they were threatening me with snow by midweek. Just a few flakes mixed with rain, probably. But still. It’s not yet Halloween.

To rescue the moment, I built a roaring fire in my woodstove. That would show the Weather Gods, such as they are around here.

In Greece, they really had Weather Gods. Zeus threw lightning bolts.

My head is still there, though my body shivers as a cold rain falls here in the San Juan Islands. Such is the magic of modern travel. Last Thursday, I was on another island — the sunny isle of Rhodes, the largest of Greece’s Dodecanese Islands. Instead of edging the Salish Sea and looking across at Lopez Island, I was in the Aegean Sea, looking 11 miles across to Türkiye, as it now spells itself.

After an idyllic five days on the other side of Greece with my friends Jackie and Joel in the Mani district of the Peloponnese — Jackie is now known to me as “Mani Mama” — I caught a plane out of Athens for the hour flight to Rhodes.

Just getting to the airport was an adventure. Rather than make the three-hour return to the capital on the comfortable intercity bus, which would deposit me at a bus station many miles from the airport, with Jackie’s determined assistance I got a ride with a local guy who regularly made a few extra bucks by ferrying folks to Athens in his Ford minivan.

He charged almost four times the bus fare, but he got me directly to the airport for my evening flight, saving me considerable trouble at the Athens end.

The thing was, the driver (I’ll call him Spiro, not his real name) didn’t let on that he would have a fully crammed van, with five passengers going to several different destinations. Or that he would rocket at 80 mph once we hit the tollway. Or that, as we arrived at the airport, he would cagily ask for payment before we got to the departures curb, so police wouldn’t see. (I suspected Spiro wasn’t a licensed taxi driver.) It felt like we were refugees fleeing Syria.

Rhodes was a challenge and a delight. Having booked an Airbnb inside the medieval walled city where narrow cobbled passages limit traffic to pedestrians and motorbikes, I doubled my challenge by arriving after dark. Finding my lodgings was like navigating a corn maze by moonlight. But bless the resourcefulness of my Greek hosts, who emailed photos of the appropriate entry gate, a tiny door to a souvenir shop across from my domicile’s side alley, and another photo of my arched brown door with two gray steps. I was glad I’d brought my mountaineering headlamp.

My hosts also suggested a place for dinner: Kostas’ Taverna (which is like saying “Joe’s Diner” in the U.S.A.). It was a five-minute walk through dim stone passages with only the feral cats to keep me company, but when I got there it was brightly lit and comfortably full of happy diners. A stooped little man with an obsequious grin — Kostas himself? — brought me a generous glass of good Greek wine, followed by platters of roasted eggplant with feta, onion and parsley, and a splendid salad generously garnished with manouri cheese and aglow with crimson tomatoes. It was my favorite meal outside the Mani.

My next day was filled with wandering the Old Town and marveling at its varied history. Walled or not, the place had a virtual revolving door for invaders, with occupations by European Catholic knights, Ottoman conquerors, Persians and Saracens. A highlight was the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, which could easily have starred in a Monty Python movie with a taunting Frenchman atop a turret.

Back to Athens for a quick overnight in a Muppet-sized rental flat mid-city, then up hours before dawn to catch a train back to the airport. Thus began one of my longest and most challenging travel days ever.

On the trip out of Seattle on Turkish Airlines 12 days earlier, I mysteriously lucked into having a row of three seats to myself in the Economy section of a nicely appointed, otherwise full 787. For the 10-hour overnight nonstop to Istanbul, I was blessedly able to stretch across the seat and get some real sleep.

The flight home, almost 12 hours of bucking headwinds, was karmic payback. (Sometimes life really is fair, I guess.)

Instead of three seats for Brian, I shared my row with a little man who was almost as wide as he was tall, sitting in the middle seat and taking up a quarter of my space as well, with his wife huddled in the window seat. Added to the long hours of being squeezed warmly against him, every time we encountered turbulence (worst I’ve ever experienced, and frequent) I watched his wife go into a ritual of moaning, chanting and raising her arms to heaven, all in Russian except for the word “Jesus” frequently intermingled, loud enough for all the plane to hear. (It really did not help the stress level.) At one point I put on my headphones and tried to find soothing music on the sound system, only to get stuck on some very unsoothing jazz with the volume at full blast, and for the life of me I couldn’t find the volume control. Unintentionally, but only partly to my chagrin, she heard it and stopped her chest-beating. Of course, that was only supplanted by the shrieking of an emotionally overtaxed toddler two rows away whose lung capacity and endurance will someday make her a champion pearl diver.

By the time I was staggering through Passport Control at Sea-Tac, I’d been on the go for 22 hours since Athens, with only about an hour of dozing on the plane.

Oh, well. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, is my take on it. But I don’t know that I will tackle long-distance travel on my own-some again anytime soon.

The flip side of ranting about my seatmates: Once I came round to chatting them up like human beings (yes, they spoke English, while I could say only “Da!” and “Nyet!” in their language), I found them to be kind and interesting folks. Born in Kazakhstan during the Soviet era, he was retired from a 30-year career as an airline pilot for Aeroflot. His wife had “won a lottery” to get a green card and they now lived in Tacoma, with family in Snohomish. On parting he gave me a heartwarming handshake and sincere wishes for my good health (after likely noticing that I kept getting served “diabetic meals”). Another example of how travel brings people together in good ways if they open their hearts.

I recovered with a couple nights of intense sleep at sister-in-law Julie’s north of Seattle. On the drive home Sunday, at a Skagit Valley farmstand I bought a cinnamon-orange pumpkin for my step. This week I’m busy planning a Halloween costume for the annual family party.

Glad I went. Glad to be home. That’s how journeys should go, don’t you think?

Editor’s note: I later learned that “Spiro” was, in fact, licensed to transport passengers, and that he asked for payment before reaching the curb in response to new rules designed to expedite traffic at the air terminal.