Jay Ebben

Painted Hives Jay Ebben

When Wilber Jansen was thirteen years old, he had a strange and vivid dream about a vineyard with a cricket field in Slovenia. He told his best friend, Sasha, about it the next day, and she responded, "That sounds like the place where we should get married!" With those words, Wilber suddenly found himself with a new direction in life: he was in love with Sasha and intent on marrying her.

But Sasha and her family moved away to Europe and Wilber lost touch with her. The dream about the vineyard revisited him every night--in each dream Sasha would be there waiting for him. Every morning he'd awaken with the hope that one day he would find her.

Now, it's six years later and Wilber is attending college where he stumbles across an opportunity to attend a week-long beekeeping class in Slovenia. He realizes that this is his chance--he could go to Slovenia and find the vineyard from his dream. Maybe Sasha will actually be there waiting for him!

Arriving in the capital city of Ljubljana, he meets two people who astonishingly resemble characters from his dream . . . and with that, Wilber's adventure begins. Freaked out by these and other encounters, and with only a week to find Sasha, Wilber enlists his beekeeper mentor and befriends an attractive and bubbly bank teller, Nina, to help him. They set off on a journey to discover the location of the vineyard with the cricket field . . . expecting to find Sasha.