Late in her charming memoir of the transforming aura of Greece, Elizabeth "Tad" Landsdale quotes some famous lines from the poem "Ithaka" by the greatest of Modern Greek poets, C.P.Cavafy: "pray your road is a long one, /full of adventure, full of discovery," a road that will allow you to pass throughhts raised high, /as long as a rare excitement .stirs your spirit and your body." The particular context of the quote is a family journey from Thessaloniki to Turkey and Bulgaria, but Cavafy's lines can stand as a methphor for the author's long journey as a young bride arriving from America to take the road of discovery through an unfamiliar, trying, often exhilarating foreign country, a new career as the essential if not always fully recognized wife of an inspiring school director and mother of four children each with a dual allegiance, while searching for her just place in the Mediterranean sun. The story of her winding path to an ultimate Ithaka first of all evokes moving images of her personal resilience but also of the spiritual education that came to her from serving the American Farm School in Thessaloniki for over forty years and the rare excitement of doing so in the country she came to love as her own.