Excerpt: Evi

Okay, look. I get that sparkling blue seas and sunsets appeal to some, but I’ve got to let you in on a little secret, which is this: one traveler’s paradise is another traveler’s dusty, hot, bug infested recurring nightmare.
“Will you look at that?” the driver commented, the pride dripping from his voice.
Screw the spoon, I thought. If he says one more word about how beautiful the view is, I’ll need to be gagged with a shovel.
True, there are worse places my literal guilt trip could have led me, but I was too sticky, cranky and exhausted to think of any.
The taxi driver, current host of this nightmare, turned and looked at me over his shoulder. I don’t know who was more annoyed. Him, by my lack of enthusiasm for returning to my homeland, or me, for the fact that he’d taken his eyes off the crumbling, snaking mountain road.
“Why did you come if you hate it here so much,” he asked. He was still staring right at me and my sleeping two year old.
Alaska, I thought. I could be back at Denali National Park, being eaten alive by swarms of angry mosquitos. That was worse. Or maybe hiking in Colorado with all the hail and the lightening. Or the horseflies in Oberlin, Kansas, who devoured me and caused my legs to swell. All worse, right?
I looked from his eyes to the windshield. He took the hint, and faced the road again.
“What was I going to say?” I asked him. No?”
He nodded, and seemed to understand. “Family,” he said.
“My family,” I groaned.
I stared at the anti-evil eye charm swinging from the rearview mirror. A lot of good it was doing me. Anna was spread out on top of me like a blanket, sleeping more soundly than ever. Thanks to a plane delay and a bout of airsickness at the Frankfurt airport, followed by a mad dash to our gate, Anna was down to her last three wipes and the last change of clothes in her diaper bag. Not to mention she was currently wearing her last pair of pull-ups.
No, I decided. Mosquitos, horseflies, and hail weren’t worse. We’d had Deet and tents to solve our problems. Right here, right now, I had nothing.
And I, Evi Maroulaki, experienced world traveler and host of the Travel Something show and the Nomadic Mommies blog, was failing miserably.
The driver spun the car around a curve. The setting sun and the Libyan Sea appeared before us, daring me to revel in it’s magical blue glory. “Isn’t it beautiful?” the driver asked again.
Beautiful? Well, if I hadn’t been so busy thinking about the fact that I was going to die, right here, right now, with my sleeping child, I might have have a few moments for form an opinion.
“Yeah, it could be a postcard,” I said. The driver shook his head, clearly disappointed by my sarcasm.
Anna stirred and clutched the hand of her Raggedy Ann doll even tighter, but she buried her sweaty face in my purple cotton t-shirt and went right back to sleep.
The driver turned up the volume on the radio, lit a cigarette, and slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a flock of sheep from suddenly turning into street souvlaki. The sign in front of the car read, “Irapetra, 2 kilometers. Kouklia, 8 kilometers.”