Archive: 2026-04
Week 274: London to Athens via Rome (and a few other places)
The London Okinawa Sanshinkai was invited to perform at Japan Festival Greece in Athens on the Easter weekend – our Easter, that is; Orthodox Easter as celebrated in Greece falls a week later this year – and I decided to take part. L— and I chose to make a proper holiday of it: rather than flying to Athens, we’d take the long route by train and ferry, and stop off at some other places along the way. The itinerary, travel, and hotels were all organised by Byway, who we used to arrange our trip to the Basque country last year, using their concierge service. It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t all that expensive either, considering that it included travel, hotels, and first class upgrades on most of the train journeys. It was also very easy and almost certainly cheaper than the nightmare of administration that booking it ourselves would have been.