Exploring Ionian Lifestyles on Corfu

In 2022, we were thrilled to be able to attend a friend’s wedding in Greece. And we figured that as long as we were halfway around the world, we should make a big trip out of it too. First stop, Corfu!

For those who are unfamiliar (I was!), Corfu is a fairly large island on the north eastern-most side of Greece. It sits a couple miles off the mainland, actually closer to Albania than to the rest of Greece. The island is known for its beaches, historic sites, its wine (some folks claim, anyways), and for its beautiful garden-island atmosphere. It also has a super interesting history, that I won’t go into here but is worth a read! We would gladly have spent much longer exploring the island, but alas we only had about five days.

The first couple of those we spent in the Old Town of Corfu, which is actually a world heritage site. We wandered around the different parts of town built in various centuries, visited the New Fortress (originally built in the 1500s) and also looked at the Old Fortress but didn’t go inside. Our baggage was delayed a couple days, so we went shopping for clothes – something we’ve almost never done while on vacation – which meant we got to see parts of town we may have never otherwise visited. : )

After picking up our baggage from the airport, we headed over to the small town of Pelekas on the west side of the island. It’s probably fair to call Pelekas a beach community – you have to drive down a steep hillside road to reach “town”, there are a variety of hotels along a very wide sandy beach, and you inevitably see a lot of tourists. (We were happy to discover the the tourists were, for the most part, Greek or English rather than American. Made it feel like we’d discovered somewhere unknown!)

Pelekas is also next door to the even smaller cliff-side town of Pentati, where the wedding was held in the town’s small church with a million dollar view. (I was glad to have a few years of driving a manual car in San Francisco to rely on while navigating from one town to the other.) The ceremony was in Greek, was very traditional, and was so much fun. We’re incredibly happy that we were able to join. And it meant that we got to share this part of the trip with Jill, Peyton, and Gwen as well! Such fun times.

We did a couple day trips/activities beyond the wedding too, including:

• Hiking up to a very old castle with amazing views of some of the clearest blue water shoreline I’ve seen
• Renting kayaks, exploring seaside cliffs, and almost capsizing along the way due to a leak somewhere in the hull
• Heading up to the uniquely beautiful but also busy resort town of Paleokastritsa

It’s also worth mentioning that our stay in Corfu marked the beginning of our brief, passionate affair with Greek salad – it was everywhere we went in Greece, and it was consistently amazing. I also ordered what turned out to be the largest baklava of my life, but not the best baklava of my life – that was still to come later in the trip.