totally worth the wait. GREAT story.
That is an AMAZING story, Dutch. Thank you for sharing it!
In the midst of all the octupus eating hedonism, I hope you called your mamas. I'll be saving this story to show my son when he embarks on his travels.
WOW. That is some story.
parents were called when we saw the first payphone after leaving the station.
These stories are awesome. Especially love the Arkansas/Beowulf analogy.
so amazing-- best-ever! also, happy anniversary!
I'm no expert but I think your writing is amazing. A lot of people can write, but only a few can seemingly effortlessly draw you in and wrap you in the words as though the story is literally unfolding around you. I loved it, thanks for a great read on a dreary day!
What a happy ending to a wonderfully told story.
I practically cheered! Great story and very well-told. Thank you!
Fantastic story and you are a talented story teller. Thanks for sharing!
It was a great story. But I hadn't read your make-out-all-night-long story before. It sent me right back to my own dorm life, including a missed stairwell moment. Ahh, the good ol' days.
that story is nearly unbelievable. my theological brain makes me say lucky coincidence, but my heart believes that there are no coincidences. either way, thank the good lord it worked out the way it did. i tell my husband there are some things that are worth spending the money on, as i pry open his tightly clutched fist. a locked cabin door is certainly one of them.
happy smoochaversary- what is it about the impending end of a semester that throws two unwilling-to-admit-the-potential-of their-feelings college kids together like that? i love knowing that your relationship exists and is a testament to crazy-ass kid love that blossoms into mature grown-up love.
Our smoochaversary (14 years) was April 14th. Happy happy! We still celebrate that as much as we celebrate our wedding anniversary.
TERRIFIC story, well told.
Oh my god, I loved this story. I've been a lurker reading your stuff for awhile, but had to leave a comment on this one. I was stranded in the former Yugoslavia one time and your story made me remember my own remarkable adventure. You guys rock.
I'm oscillating between joy at the brilliance of this story and emptiness that the arsenal might have been emptied. Please say there are more stories in there?
Fantastic! We dealt with pickpockets while in rome, and it was all very scary. My greatest european loss though was a tube of discontinued lip gloss, which, at age 16, felt like a veritable tragedy.
This relates more to the Wendell Berry thing: After reading some of his works and especially reading about his distaste for computers, I had thought to make all my own paper and write all my college papers and homework on paper, using real ink.
I think I still might next semester.
Thank GOD you finished this story! My anxiety is now abated. Phew.
Also nice to hear about your kissiversary. I love that you remember the feeling of your first kiss...my husband and I have been together half the time that you have, but we both remember ours, too. We actually got married exactly three years later, so my kissiversary and anniversary are on the same day. The memories of our first date mingle with the memories of our first dance. Delightful.
Great story! What good luck!
Wow. An incredible tale, and wonderful writing. Thanks.
Thank you for sharing this story with us, it was fantastic!
wow you guys were lucky. I never had anything happen while I was traveling. Then again, most of the time I was with five huge guys from various NY bourroughs. I never evn got whistled at in Italy which is part of the whole experience.
Thank God--a happy ending!
"Nestled within the parabolas of age"? Get thee to a publisher.
This was a wonderful, beautiful, amazing story. Thanks.
Bravo. My stepfather tells a horrible, wonderful story about how his oldest daughter ran away to Greece when she was sixteen (he had to fly to Rome to get her back, although I've heard conflicting versions of who flew where for what exact purpose.) Your parents probably tell some similarly horrifying account of their babies destitute on Crete. And happy anniversary.
Thank you for finishing this. It was a great story.
I loved this story, there is nothing quite like having the rug pulled completely out from under you. And then without warning, oh so carefully placed right back.
Wow. Just, wow. Such a beautifully told story. You kept a lock of her hair?? Good lord, man, that is the most romantic thing I've ever heard! And I thought I was lucky. After going back to read about how you met and seeing how you still feel about each other ten years later, well, I think I just fell in love with both of you.
Juniper is so lucky to grow up with you two as parents.
Having traveled a lot and having had some scary experiences (but not nearly as bad as yours) is exactly why I am always kind to kids backpacking around. Ahhh, the kindness of strangers and how it can come full circle.
Thank you so much for being willing to share your amazing tales. Your website is one of the few that I get a true pleasure out of reading.
Bravo! My personal Greece anecdote involves trying to break into the Acropolis ( I know it's open air, but the grounds were closed in the wee hours of the night), and getting caught by guards after tripping the sophisticated security device known as a string with bell.
Say, random question not pertaining to Greece...
Do you call each other Dutch and Wood in "real life"? Do other people call you that? Or are those pseudonyms just for this website?
Ooo, I can tell I'm really going to enjoy thumbing through your archives. Great post! Also, I love the word "mustachioed." Happy anniversary!
My jaw hit the floor when you got everything back and it totally freaked my husband out. He thought something terrible had happend but no! Something wonderful and good!
Thanks so much for the beautifully told tale. I really love you guys.
Amazing. Awesome. Wonderful. What an experience! Thank you for sharing!
You guys have got to be the most interesting people I have never met. Fantastic stories (pretty much all of them, really, not just this one). I read your stuff and constantly find myself thinking one of two things: My God, they're brilliant, and how the heck do they find the time to accomplish all that? Must be the brilliance in action. Thank you.
It's been a long and stressful week, and as I came your page just before trying to get some sleep, I wished so hard that the rest of this story would be here. And here it was, and more amazing and wonderful than I had imagined. Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful story of love and hope.
I'm spending some time in Crete this summer; I've been before but my partner's never been. Beautiful place; got a charm often lost in many parts of Europe these days.
I just realised you're the only American whose blog/journal/site/anything I read who is actually very well travelled, especially in Europe 
Is a weel-travelled American as rare a thing as blog culture would indicate?
No, it's not rare, and that's both patronizing and pretentious. Keep in mind we've got a large country to explore over HERE, and that it's often cost prohibitive to get over THERE. Oh, and your definition of "weel-travelled" may not be everyone's. Jeez.
Wow, feel free to remove that. That did piss me off, but I didn't follow my "wait five minutes" rule... And I didn't mean to be anonymous (though I mean to now!).
Anonymous is right--- we aren't so well-traveled. Metrodad---THAT guy is well-traveled. Seems like every week he's rushing off to Paris for a wedding or Asia for business. Wood has traveled more than me (she has lived in Cambodia and traveled throughout Southeast Asia and southern China). But for all the (generally European) complaining that Americans aren't well-cultured or even exposed to other cultures, I think there is an equal amount of rancor over boorish American tourists clogging their most scenic districts. . .
If you read parenting blogs, you're not going to see a lot of people writing about their travels, especially when it's so hard to travel with kids. But there are plenty of American parent bloggers actually blogging from other countries where they are raising their kids (see Jennifer's blog: http://www.italiantrivia.blogspot.com/)
And not every blogger is going to impose his/her stories of stupid youthful travel on his/her readers. I'm lucky that anyone actually cares.
Great story, Dutch. I went to Greece on my honeymoon and your story brought back memories. Although, we didn't go through anything as harrowing as what you and Wood went through but it brought back memories nonetheless. Thank you.
This story really makes me love you guys. I also met my husband as a freshman in college - 9 years ago this month. It really is great to still be kissing the same person 9 years later. It just keeps getting better!
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!
sigh ... my life is boring ... and while I'm almost always happy with that ... just occaisionally, it might be nice to have a little adventure. Glad it all worked out ... and ditto on the great writing comments ... as always, you have your reader right there with you for the adventure. Whether the adventure is Elmo on stage, or true crime in Crete ... you do have a waay with words ...
Holy. Crap. That is all I could say when you got to the point where all your stuff was found. I was feeling the lonely, scary, trapped-in-a-foreign-country feeling I always have a little bit of when I travel after I read the first part. That's how well written it was. How amazing that you got it all back!
For your next adventure, get a PacSafe. It's a tad heavy, but worth its weight in gold. http://www.pac-safe.com/www/inde...on=detail&
id=50
Crazy story. You guys have a great blog.
OMG!! This story absolutely rocks! It should be placed in a time capsule somewhere for someone to find 200 years from now when everyone is wearing space suits and listening to Big Brother.
That was an amazing, magical story - what incredible luck conspired for the two of you! I love these tales of yours, Dutch, like amazing fables.
I love your story, and again the writing is superb. But, come on now, some of us in the rural south have read Beowulf, but granted, we don't likely work in the police station. Then again, I never have been that impressed with Arkansas.
I also read your kissiversary story, and realize that my grad student schedule has me neglecting my husband and all those awesome feelings we had 7 years ago on our kisseversary. Thanks for reminding me to act out my affection as you and Wood do for each other.
Oh..one more thing. I love the Perfect Strangers reference.
the reference to Arkansas was not to insinuate that southerners are less educated, but with the accent down there I felt like it would be as far from the original Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf as the modern-Crete-accented Greek the cops spoke was from the Attic Greek I was sputtering out.
Now this is what I call a Romance. You know it's Meant To Be when you get all your money back- That kind of amazing coincidence only happens with your soul mate.
Delurking to say fabulous story! My husband is a bit older than I am, so when we met, I was fresh out of college, but he already had a kid about to hit middle school, a house, a 9-5, etc. etc. Consequently, we never got to be as footloose and fancy free as other newlyweds. You're lucky that you and Wood have had an opportunity to do so much together.
I love happy endings.
I think you should turn this into a short story and submit it to the New Yorker. Although it isn't fiction, so maybe a different magazine would be more apropriate.
Excellent story, incredible writing.
We have a very good friend who was born and raised in Greece. From the tales he's told over the years, I'd say you nailed the Greek business culture in this one sentence:
"Fully operational in the Greek sense: several mustachioed men lounged about in an office setting, one pecking lazily at an old-fashioned typewriter, another fully asleep at his desk."
Thanks to him, we now say we're "on Greek time" whenever we're late for anything, and we often do "Greek good-byes" -- which means it takes a good 20-30 minutes to leave a dinner party, even when we only live blocks away and see each other daily.
Great blog. It's my favorite place to come when I need some respite from Current Events 2007.
love the reminiscing! Maybe you could write more about what happened after you and Wood parted ways for the first summer?
Wonderful story. I was so thrilled when I got to the point where you get your stuff back.
omg. see this is why my mother made me bring and use a moneybelt when i studied in italy!
crazy insane story.
It's so cool that y'all have stories like that. Loved it.
You have a wonderful gift for storytelling. I enjoyed reading that so very much -- particularly since it had a happy ending.
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