After Istanbul, our honeymoon continued to a place that had been sitting near the top of our travel wish list for years: Santorini, Greece.

Like everyone else, we had seen the photographs—the whitewashed villages spilling down the cliffs, blue-domed churches, and the almost impossibly blue Aegean Sea. I expected Santorini to be beautiful. What I didn’t expect was how much I would end up loving everything around the beauty.

We visited in February, which meant we experienced a very different version of the island than the crowded summer Santorini most people picture.

It was quiet.

Really quiet.

Many restaurants and shops were closed for the season, the narrow pathways were nearly empty, and there were moments when it felt like entire sections of Oia belonged only to us. The weather shifted between cool, cloudy, and dramatic, but rather than taking anything away from the experience, it gave the island a moodiness I loved.

We weren’t seeing Santorini dressed up for its busiest season.

We were seeing it slowed down.

Without the crowds, there was room to notice the weathered buildings, narrow passageways, endless stone steps, donkeys moving through town, locals going about their everyday lives, and all the little imperfections that made the island feel less like a postcard and more like a real place.

We stayed in an authentic Greek house built directly into the hillside in Oia. It was surrounded by winding pathways, steep roads, and enough stairs to make every simple outing feel like an unexpected leg workout.

Our legs may not have been impressed with our choice of accommodations, but we were.

Every climb seemed worth it the moment we stepped outside and looked across the cliffs and the sea.

And because this was our honeymoon—and apparently beautiful scenery alone wasn’t enough entertainment—we had already brought a little chaos with us.

Most notably, Sarah’s luggage had gone missing.

Nothing says romantic Mediterranean honeymoon quite like arriving in Greece while one member of the couple has no clothes.

Thankfully, Santorini had plenty of distractions.

One of the things I remember most clearly is the people we met along the way.

We somehow acquired our own unofficial personal taxi driver, who drove us along the island’s winding roads and gradually became part chauffeur, part local guide, and part familiar face during our stay.

Then there was Peter.

We met him on one of our boat excursions. He was traveling alone and making his way around the world, and a simple conversation turned into spending part of the day together. All these years later, we are still connected on Facebook.

Those chance encounters have become one of my favorite things about travel.

You leave home expecting to remember the monument, the famous view, or the photograph you traveled halfway around the world to take. Then years later, you realize you also remember the stranger you talked to on a boat or the taxi driver who somehow became part of your trip.

Some of our favorite experiences took us completely away from the polished white buildings of Oia.

We made our way down to Santorini’s Old Port and boarded a boat into the caldera, eventually reaching Nea Kameni.

Walking across Nea Kameni felt like stepping onto another planet.

The landscape was black, barren, rugged, and volcanic—a complete contrast to the bright white villages sitting above the sea. Under our feet was dark volcanic rock, while all around us stretched the enormous caldera.

From there, we continued toward Palea Kameni and the sulfur-rich hot springs.

There is something wonderfully ridiculous about voluntarily jumping into water that smells like rotten eggs and thinking, Yes. This is exactly what vacation is supposed to be.

And yet, in its strange way, it was fantastic.

But my favorite part of the day was still waiting back at the Old Port.

Rather than climbing the long, steep path ourselves, I got to ride a donkey back up the mountainside.

For me, this was fantastic.

I am not entirely convinced the donkey shared my enthusiasm.

That simple ride became one of my favorite memories from Greece—and one of those experiences that probably says more about the trip than another photograph of a blue dome ever could.

When I look through my photographs from Santorini now, I notice something else.

Yes, I photographed the famous views.

How could I not?

But my camera kept wandering away from them.

Toward worn stairways.

Changing skies.

Black volcanic rock.

Local faces.

A man and his donkey.

Sarah.

Small moments unfolding in an extraordinary place.

Those photographs remind me that somewhere along the way, Santorini stopped feeling like the Santorini we had seen in magazines and started feeling like ours.

Not because we discovered some secret version of the island, but because our memories of it became tied to the things no photograph could have prepared us for—the empty streets, the cold February air, Sarah’s missing suitcase, Peter, our taxi driver, sulfur water and a donkey climbing the mountain.

Santorini taught me that a place doesn’t have to be experienced under perfect conditions to be extraordinary.

Sometimes the off-season weather, the things that go wrong, the strangers who briefly enter your life, and the ridiculous situations you never planned become the pieces you remember most.

Travel asks us to slow down enough to notice those things.

To pay attention.

To stay open to people.

To laugh when the plan falls apart.

And to understand that the experiences that stay with us are rarely limited to the ones we carefully planned before we left home.

Maybe that is one of the greatest gifts these journeys have given me.

They don’t simply remind me where I have been.

They remind me who I was when I was there, who was beside me, what made us laugh, what mattered to us then, what the journey taught us, and just how much life can change between one passport stamp and the next.

We went to Santorini expecting the blue domes, dramatic cliffs, and views we had seen in a thousand photographs.

We certainly found them.

But the places may be what bring us across the world.

The people, laughter, imperfections, lessons, and completely unexpected moments are what travel leaves behind in us.