Sometimes, the past is a country one just shouldn't revisit.

Two decades ago, I shoved the necessities of life into a heavy canvas backpack and boarded a plane for Europe. The three months I spent trekking around the continent remain vivid more than half a lifetime later.

Some of the most vibrant memories:

• The beautiful, desperate beggar girl clutching a baby in the Milan train station, grabbing my arm and crying for a few lira.
• Riding an old train through Austria and absentmindedly looking at the well-patched, regularly spaced but oddly circular small holes scattered throughout the worn wooden car; recognizing with a cold chill they were strafe marks.
• Kissing Pip the Punk goodbye on a train to Paris at 3 a.m.
• Mouthing along with the songs at the stage musical "Chess" with Murray Head and Elaine Paige during its first month on stage in London; I'd memorized the double album the year before. I had just sold my camera for return airfare, and used the last £8 for tickets.
• Seeing my first thong bikini while sailing over the flawless Mediterranean from Greece to Italy.
• Sleeping in the TV room of a men's charity hostel in London, because I'd spent my last £8 on tickets to a play. They showed "Rambo" the night before, and being American was more than embarrassing.
• Claudia.
• Standing in front of Michaelangelo's "Jesus and Mary" sculpture in the Vatican for nearly an hour. I've never seen a piece of art that had me so transfixed, before or since.
• Touring the Guinness factory.
• Hitchhiking to Galway on a windy autumn day.
• Hiding from the ticket-taker in a train bathroom on the way to London.
• Boarding a train in Rome, thinking I'm headed for France, and waking up in Sicily.
• Watching (and listening to) the ugliest couple in the world as they snored from Rome to Amsterdam.

One highlight not mentioned above included the nearly two weeks I spent in Greece, on the island of Corfu (Kerkyra). This little island is one of the most northwest Greek islands, and the easiest to reach from Italy - for me, it was by ferry from Brindisi. It's a party island, with the north attracting families looking for an inexpensive getaway in the sun. The rocky mountain roads were narrow and dangerous, especially by moped. The food was, not to put too fine a point on it, perfect... gyros and souvlaki and tzetziki and baklava, served in tiny shops with smoke wafting into my eyes from the well-used grill. The girls were friendly, the men loud and protective of the friendly girls, and everyone was looking for the most entertaining way to part tourists from their drachmas. I rented a moped and tooled around the island, jaunting past the fat tourist families littering the beaches of north Rodha to the southern town of Sparterá, and around the main town of Kérkyra.

I stayed at the Hotel Pink Paradise, on the beach. It really was painted pink. The jacuzzi was filled with cold water, and was very popular. The attached disco had "real Greek dancing" every night, where they broke plates over laughing guests' heads, and passed a bucket of ouzo around with large shotglasses. The owner danced with a table in his teeth, never spilling a drop of ouzo in the glasses on the table.

On my fourth day in Corfu, I ran into a fellow American, who coincidentally happened to live less than a mile from where I did back home. He'd been to Greece before and advised me on the best places to visit. One place not mentioned in any guide was on the west coast: Pelekas Beach. It was reachable only by a long dirt road that switched back and forth along a steep, rocky cliff. Mopeds and 4-wheel drive vehicles were the only way to reach it. Most who ventured there went by foot after taking a bus to a lonely stop in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign, no trailhead. Just dirt leading down.

Burdened with a backpack, it took nearly half an hour to wind my way down while the hot Greek sun beat down on my reddening shoulders. (Fortunately, I still had hair then, so my head didn't burn.) Once onto the perfect white beach, I could see only three buildings: an ouzo bar with a few rooms to let, a tiny shack that claimed the grandiose title of 'hotel' (although it wouldn't have looked out of place in a ghost town in the American midwest), and a tiny souvlaki restaurant. The beach was maybe three quarters of a mile long, a couple of hundred yards deep, and not crowded in the least.

Every single person on the beach was between the ages of 17 and 40. There were no children. Many people went nude, but many didn't. (I didn't.) There was beach volleyball, sunbathing, races up and down the beach, various paddle ball games going on, and several firepits with smoldering embers slowly cooking lunches or dinners. Everyone was in prime shape - they'd have to be, just to reach the place.

I stayed five days.

My time was spent walking or running the beach, swimming in the azure, crystal clear Mediterranean with bright fish swarming around my knees, or chatting in a mix of languages with various people who were similarly enjoying this most perfect of paradises. The souvlaki (like gyros, but on a stick) was crispy on the outside and tangy on the inside. My skin turned brown, my hair turned blond, my muscles - already toughened by a month of lugging a backpack around Europe - were in peak condition. I was mistaken for German many times. I bought a small bottle of licorice-tasting ouzo, but drank less than half before giving the rest away. There were no yelling kids, no organized activities, no vehicles except the Land Rover that traversed the switchback road twice daily to ferry in supplies. I wove a reed mattress from dead plants, and slept on the beach in a mylar blanket. Nights were unspoiled by any electric lights. I saw the Milky Way galaxy with a clarity I'd never before experienced. Every day brought increased serenity, as the place settled into my skin: the blue green aqua colors of the sea, the browns and reds and whites of the cliff, the salty smell with an occasional mouthwatering taste of lamb cooking on the spit, the feel of the sun and the sand and the silky water.

I reluctantly left to explore new things, but those five days stand out as the pinnacle of relaxation. There was no better place on earth I'd ever been. When I left, I took a little piece of it with me. The memory of Pelekas Beach has remained pure in my memory for these score of years, unsullied by progress, always the same sparsely-populated paradise as the summer of '86.

Until last weekend.

A friend was over, and he was talking about spending the summer on Crete. We got to talking about my experience from years gone by, and he suggested that I Google Pelekas Beach. I should've known it was a mistake, but I typed it in anyway.

They have their own website. The vacation rooms are opulent and extensive. There are family specials. There's a free minibus to the beach. There's fire juggling. There's a supermarket a few miles up the road. There's bright red plastic lawn chairs and pink bicycles and paved flagstones and floating mattresses for sale. There's babysitting services and Internet access and washing machines.

There's nothing left of where I was.

The place it's become sounds quite nice, the type of place that would be fun to take the family on vacation. But the shape of it doesn't fit my memories. There's no more place for a 21-year-old with a backpack and urge to hit the road. No more nude volleyball and laissez-faire bohemian discussions in English and Greek and German. The charm of the location was its inaccessability. There were no large German men wearing Speedos watching their children throw sand at each other - that sort of thing stayed at Rodha.

That'll teach me to do anything silly like Google a memory again. I want the Italian mountainside to remain rustic, the trains to stay fashionably late, the monuments of Rome to be perpetually stained with bird poo, the beaches to be free of commercialism. And as long as I don't go looking, the rest of the places I visited in those three months will always remain that way.

For me.