The gate at Piraeus closed at 6:55 and two of our six were still in the coffee queue, holding cups they could not carry through, and I remember thinking that the week would be exactly this. Five of us made it onto the gangway with the bags. The sixth came around the corner at 6:53, passport in his teeth, and the attendant waved him through with the bored patience of someone who has watched a thousand people run for a sailing.
It was a thirtieth birthday, the kind of trip where one person has an idea and five others say yes without asking what it costs in hours. I was the one with the folder. I had booked three islands in six days and then quietly booked the first ferry myself after seeing what the 6:40 sailing costs at eight in the morning in July.
Piraeus, six in the morning
The plan had one line that mattered: the ferry is the schedule, everything else hangs off it. So we were at the port at 6:20 for a 7:10 sailing, forty minutes early for a boarding that takes fifteen. Two of the group called that excessive in the taxi. By 6:55, with the gate closing and the coffee still in someone's hand, nobody called it anything.
The crossing to Naxos is two hours and fifty minutes, and the ship does what ships do: a deck, a queue for the food counter that moves slower than the sea, and a man who announces the approach in three languages before anyone can hear it over the engines. I spent the first forty minutes working out where we would stand when the boat tied up, because the detail that ruins a group arrival is not the ferry, it is the eleven minutes after it.
Naxos, and the forty minutes nobody planned
The port is a ten-minute walk from the old town, downhill on the way there and up on the way back, with luggage. Six people, six bags, one of them a hard case that has never rolled well on cobbles. Two of us had done this walk before and knew the shortcut through the lanes, and four had not, so the group split into a fast half and a slow half that met at a square where nobody could agree on coffee.
I had put forty minutes in the plan for that walk. It took fifty-eight, and I have since put an hour in every port where the bags meet cobbles. The apartment owner was waiting with the door open because I had called him from the ferry deck, which is the phone call I make on every trip: not to ask directions, just to say the boat is late, the boat is always late, and here is what the delay looks like.
What the group lost was the first swim. What it got, without noticing for another day, was a lunch in a place that only serves food from noon, chosen because it was the first door we reached. Two people have asked since where we ate on day one. Nobody remembers the name. Everybody remembers the chips.
The second crossing, 7:20 in the morning
The ticket office on Naxos opens at seven and the queue by 7:05 is full of people who learned the same lesson: in August the 8:25 sails full and the 7:20 does not. We bought four tickets at the window and two on the phone from the apartment, which worked only because the signal on the balcony beats the signal in the lane. Six travelers, six tickets, one confirmation number written on my hand.
That sailing ran three hours and ten minutes with a stop of nine minutes that let on nobody we could see. The detail groups get wrong is not the boat, it is the clock after it. The bus from the ferry to the town runs twice an hour and the first one leaves before the gangway is down, so we walked, twenty minutes with bags, and the two who had argued about the taxi agreed at the end that walking had been right. That argument has never once resolved itself earlier than the end.
The kitchen table in Paros
On the second island we took an apartment with a table that seated six and a kitchen that could feed them, and that decision did more for the week than any view. We cooked on three of the six nights, ate standing up twice, and argued about money once at that table with the calculator out, which is the correct place to have that argument rather than at a bar at midnight.
The birthday dinner was on the fourth night and I had not booked it, having learned on a previous trip that you cannot hold a table for six at nine o'clock in August by walking up at eight. One of the group called four places that afternoon from the balcony and got a 6:30 slot at the third. We were the only table at 6:30 and the room filled around us while we ate, and by eight the queue outside included two people who had wanted our table.
We had also agreed in writing on day two, in a group chat nobody can leave, what happens if someone wants a different island. The answer was that they go and meet us on the day we sail, and nobody tested it. Six people on one week is small enough to run by talking and large enough that the rule needed to exist before it was needed.
The sailing home
Our return left at 7:20 on a Monday, which meant leaving the island at 6:15 and the apartment at 6:00. I had put the departure on the kitchen wall in pen the night before, which sounds fussy until you have watched five people ask at 5:40 whether the boat is the 7:20 or the 8:30. Everybody was downstairs at 5:55. Even the man with the passport in his teeth.
What I would change is the third island. Two would have given us the same week with a full extra day on one of them, and the middle crossing ate six hours of a trip that was already short. The last morning on the water belongs to whoever got the seat by the window, and I spent it working out the next timetable, because somebody in every group of six is going to do that whether you ask them or not.