And if we'd opted for the fortnight on the railways we'd have to leave a week earlier, which would have ruled out the Leonard Cohen concert in Townsville last Thursday.
That seven day spell runs from Sunday to Saturday, with the flight in arriving on Thursday evening, and Thursday night spent in Kobe. Booking the train tickets for the week takes a chunk out of a morning or afternoon, so that takes care of Friday, with certain other logistical factors needing to be attended to, and on Saturday we move to wherever the train leg of the journey kicks off.
So where do we go?
To look at that side of things you focus your attention on the other end of the rail leg and work backwards.
We want to be in Tokyo early on Wednesday afternoon so we can book in and scope out the route between the hotel and the theatre, so whatever we do on Wednesday morning needs to be done somewhere around the capital.
Kamakura isn't that far south of Yokohama, which in turn abuts the south of the Tokyo conurbation, and our friend The Interpreter lives in Yokohama. That means dinner with The Interpreter on Tuesday night, which in turn translates to an overnight stay in Yokohama.
So we've got Sunday and Monday nights to look at, and a rail route that ends in Yokohama to nut out.
The concert side of things is Hughesy's part of the trip, so those days and nights leading up to Yokohama are Madam's reward for doing the organising. She loves the onsen experience, it's coming into winter, and there are any number of options, but the best seem to involve hot springs, mountains and snow, so that's where we're headed.
One night in Matsumoto, the other up in Niigata, both in onsen resorts, which in turn means Japanese banquets, probably served in the privacy of the room.
If that looks reasonably straightforward, it is still the result of extensive research, with most possibilities investigated and worked over with a fine tooth comb.
So it's Thursday as fly over day, Friday for sorting out tickets and such. Saturday should be an easy day, with a transfer to the northern side of Osaka in the afternoon.
Sunday morning has the transfer to ShinOsaka, and a transfer from there to Nagoya along familiar territory. We've been up and down that section of track every other time we've been in the country, and there isn't much choice about it. You're talking the main Tokaido line that links Osaka and Tokyo.