Highlights of this trip
Friends who have read every word of this blog still can’t help but ask, how was the trip? They ask for highlights. It’s hard to pick out highlights in a trip so full of them, but here’s a few:
- the ancient sites, especially the Lion Gate at Mycenae and the theatre of Epidaurus
- the mask of Agamemnon
- a British attendee at the Literary Festival in Kardamyli telling us that Mark Carney was on everyone's tongue that day, calling him “the leader of the free world.”
- a day without an agenda in Kardamyli
- sunset after sunset after sunset, especially over aperatifs
Planning
The planning began early, right after the trip to Croatia in the spring of 2025. In between then and now, up popped the opportunity to go to Morocco, thanks to Bettyanne. (The accounts of those trips are all in this blog, accessed by tags in the side bar or by clicking the “older post” button at the bottom of each page.)
So, this has been a year of travel planning. This trip was Carol’s idea. I’m thinking she loved Croatia so much, she wanted more, and in the same sea. First, she thought of Bulgaria and wondered why there were no bike-and-boat trips there until I pointed out that there are no islands along the coast of Bulgaria. Slip further down the coast, and there's Greece!
Neither of us wanted to go all the way to Europe for less than several weeks at least, so we had to figure out what would make sense to tag onto the planned boat-and-bike excursion from Corfu. The Peloponnese was it. We spent many hours researching and consulting to come up with an itinerary that met our needs. We wanted to:
- catch the major attractions and don’t-miss towns,
- do some hiking,
- avoid driving more than two or three hours in a given day,
- travel slowly enough that we didn’t exhaust ourselves, which meant staying more than one night in at least half of the places we chose.
Personally, I always start with Rick Steves, his website, books, and tour itineraries, because his philosophy fits mine, his info is updated every year, and he's done on-the-ground research that would take me years to cover. His books include walking tours of major cities and sites, full of just enough history, so there's no need to take day tours anywhere. AND his mobile app has free-of-charge audio tours. In my opinion, without some kind of guide, I'm travelling blind. Beyond Rick Steves, I dig into blogs and YouTube and all that, to find gems that suit my specific wants. I do move slower than Rick Steves suggests, since he understandably aims his itineraries at people whose time is more limited than mine.
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My well-used Rick Steves guidebook, torn apart as he suggests, to include only what I need. |
Accommodations
In our search for accommodations, we aimed for small, mid-range in price, family-owned accommodations in the middle of the action. We were not interested in luxury. Location was the number one priority.
The very first booking we made was for Athens, because, even a year out, some choice accommodations were fully booked. We booked mainly through Booking . com because of the option to cancel up to a few days ahead of the booking. Booking directly is preferable, better for the vendor, and I’d go to their website to look for cancellation policies before booking. When you’re old, as we are, you want to know you can cancel without penalty if life goes sideways, which we see happening around us all the time.
There is an ethical dilemma in renting apartments, knowing that the short-term rental market is eating up accommodations that should be available for local people to actually live. The loss of local ambience is about local people being forced out of the areas popular with tourists because owners can make ten times the rent from short-term rentals what they can from locals who just want to live there. We move in, and the ambience is gone. What was once charming becomes ticky-tacky. What drew the tourists in the first place is no longer there.
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| Beyond ticky-tacky: do people actually buy this stuff? |
We have been participants in this, having stayed in several apartments on this trip. In some cases, that was all that was available, and the apartments we stayed in were mostly not equipped to be permanent homes for anyone, but really I have no excuse. This trip has been an eye-opener for me, and I’ll chalk it up to something learned. In the future, I will look for hotels and guesthouses, not apartments. I can’t promise that will always work out.
I should note that the Anniska Hotel & Suites in Kardamyli would never have been meant to be homes to locals, but rather is aimed at the large ex-pat British population that spends months at a time there every year.
The only places on this list I would not recommend are the City Marina Hotel in Corfu, previously described, and maybe the Pension Posidon in Olympia, whose uncomfortable bed was in a room a little too small and spare (but it was definitely family-run, as the family lived upstairs, and the grandfather sat at the corner, greeting guests). In Olympia there are better options for a bit more money, while in Corfu, hotels are horribly overpriced, we wanted a room for four of us, and apartments generally won’t rent for one-night stays, so there was little choice. Here’s the lowdown, prices in Euros, which are currently valued at about $1.60 CAD. The amounts are the total paid, not the per day price.
Athens A Painter’s House in Plaka (apartment) €547 4 nights
Delphi Hotel Leto €93.11
Nafpaknos Leone Suites (apartment) €98
Kalavryta Filoxenia Hotel & Spa €81.05
Stemnitsa Gartagani Guest House €214 2 nights
Olympia Pension Posidon €56.70
Kardamyli Anniska Hotel & Suites (apartment) €250 2 nights
Nafplio Sophie’s Choice II (apartment) €315.60 3 nights
Corfu (1st stay) City Marina Hotel €188 (4 people)
Corfu (2nd stay) Theodora’s Old Corfu Home (apartment) €322 2 nights (4 people)
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| Nearly everywhere we stayed had a balcony with a view. |
Bedding
We stayed in more than one place where the beds were made with just a bottom sheet tucked in and an upper sheet folded at the base of the bed. There were usually blankets available in a cupboard, but sometimes we had to ask for them. This may have been a hangover from the very hot summer they’ve had. The nights have been mild, even in October, but I like to feel some weight on my body, so the sheet-only thing doesn’t work for me. We did get pillows everywhere, usually plenty.
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| Make your own bed |
Toilets
Greece has toilets, not squatters; at least, I didn’t see any squatters. A WC in a restaurant or other public place (including the swanky washroom of Archeological Museum in Athens) may not have a seat, so work those quads before you go!
Toilets flush like other European toilets, which is something like a geyser coming up from the front of the bowl. The first flush (in the airport loo, of course!) is always a surprise. Sometimes there’s a pump on the floor for flushing the toilet, which is weird to us. Sometimes the pump is quite a ways away from the toilet. How does that work??
In Greece, you don’t throw your toilet paper in the toilet, not anywhere. The pipes are apparently very small. It’s hard to get used to tossing your paper in the ubiquitous lidded bin, and kind of gross for us, but that’s what you have to do. I admit forgetting once or twice, and hopefully I didn’t bung up the works. I imagine all of Athens shut down because of one mindless tourist!
Food
Quality
The caveat to my food comments is that we generally did not eat in high-end places, but rather in tavernas or, in the smaller towns, whatever place would feed us. Fine dining can be had, but we did not partake. The best food we had was in Corfu, and that may have been due to following recommendations by friends, not to say being fed up with mediocre meals by then and willing to spend more for something better.
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| In the mountains, there was not a lot of choice in eateries. |
We are spoiled at home by Greek food of very high quality. My friend Heather told me before I left home that all the restaurant menus are the same, and she was pretty much right. It’s surprising how quickly you can get sick of the same choices over and over again, no matter how much you’d been looking forward to it beforehand.
Seafood is very good but meat is not great in restaurants, with chewy cuts from I-don’t-know-what-part of the animal. Neither of us is much for meat anyhow.
Choice
Greece is not really vegetarian friendly, though there are certainly some menus that note vegetarian options, in particular in the tourist cities. Other than in major centres, Zeus help the vegan. People with specific food requirements, such as celiac vegetarians (ahem), would be hard-pressed to get any variety in their choices, just like at home, really.
Feta cheese is in or on everything, in copious amounts. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but really, if I never see feta again in my life, I think that would be okay.
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| Fairly typical Greek salad. So. Much. Feta. |
Breakfast
Breakfasts in the hotels that provided it were usually continental, with pastries, white bread, cheeses, sliced smoked meats, cut fruit. Always available was wonderful Greek yoghurt that you scoop from a big bowl, better than anything we get at home. In restaurants, we had beautiful omelettes and other eggy things, keeping us well-proteined at the start of each long day.
Pita and other things we think we’ll eat in Greece
At home, Greek bread means pita. In Greece, I didn’t see pita anywhere other than in souvlaki stands. The bread served, when fresh, is okay but not outstanding, with a few exceptions. Fries were ubiquitous with meals, and we rarely saw the roasted lemon potatoes we'd hoped to feast on.
Money
Restaurant servers seemed horrified at the idea of separate bills for Carol and I, so we alternated who paid, and I kept track in a little notebook. A typical breakfast would be €10-12 for food, plus €4-5 for beverage. Main courses for lunch and dinner run about €10-25, depending of course on what you order. A moussaka comes in at the lower end, while meat and seafood are more. Portions are huge. A single Greek salad was more than the two of us could eat, without exception. The same is true for appetizers. Four people sharing these things would be ideal.
Our average day cost us €80-90 to eat, for the two of us. That doesn’t count gelato, which would add another €4-5 each. It could be done quite a bit cheaper, but I learned years ago that it doesn’t pay to cheap out on food.
Pay by tap pretty much everywhere. We could have travelled without ever using cash. The tip options ubiquitous at home are absent in Greece. If you want to leave a tip, you need to tell the cashier, or hand some coins to the server.
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| Tap is everywhere, but a little cash comes in handy |
Car Rental, Roads, & Gas
We used the Swift car rental company, as recommended by a number of travellers and bloggers. It seems to be a family business, and their online presence is minimal. The real upside of this company was that they would pick us up at our accommodation and drive us to the edge of Athens, so we didn’t have to negotiate city traffic. Communication is by email with the owner, Elias: elimano95@gmail.com. That seems rather informal, doesn't it, but an internet search for the company yields just this address as a means of contact. It works -- Elias gets back to you right away.
We paid €444 for 11 days, including maxing out on insurance, an extra charge for two drivers, and a small fee for drop-off at the airport. It seems like a bargain to me! An incidental detail: we were told when we opted for the €250 deductible extra insurance (that cost next to nothing) that we could drive the car into the sea and only pay €250. The guy didn't say anything about driving off a cliff, which would have been much more likely on the roads we drove!
When we arranged the rental, we were expecting to get a small Fiat, but what was delivered to us was a large rattletrap of a Peugeot. It looks good, but it’s a crappy car, and takes up more space that we would want. I think maybe this goes with budget rentals: you take what you get.
Gas is around €2.20 per litre (multiply by about 1.6 to get CAD) everywhere. A fill-up cost us around €80 and lasted some 700 km, which strikes me as rather good. Two fill-ups did us for the entire trip.
We paid less than €30 for highway tolls in total, and they were good value for money, since the alternate routes were slow and sometimes scary. Much of the time, there was no avoiding the winding mountain roads, and we’re glad we got to drive through tiny villages, but when a wide, straight highway was available, we took it.
Driving is not bad in Greece. Though the mountain roads are a bit hair-raising, really it’s the thought of meeting a vehicle coming the other way that raises the hair. There are not many cars on these roads, so it was okay. In the towns, there is rarely room to pass, and there has to be a bit of silent negotiation to work out how to do it. There might be a wider spot where you can squeeze by, or someone might have to back up. The locals are used to it, and no one was particularly impatient with us bumbling foreigners. In Stemnitsa, a truck driver and his buddies helped us get by when they saw the looks of panic on our faces.
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| The road by our guesthouse in Stemnitsa. Bit of a squeeze. |
On narrow streets, parking is on one side of the road only, and it doesn’t matter which way you face, you always park on that one side. Usually partly on the sidewalk.
The main roads are very good. On highways with one lane in each direction, Greek drivers will pass down the middle as if it’s another lane. I seem to remember this happening on the Autobahn in Germany too. If someone’s coming up tight behind you, squeeze right a little, and they’ll whip by you whether you think it’s safe or not.
Language
Greeks are beautiful, welcoming people, rightly proud of their country and their heritage. Only in Athens did I once encounter a sales person who appeared to be at the end of her rope (and who can blame her), but when I said, “Efharisto” as I left her shop, her face lit up and she responded, “Parakalo.” If you go to Greece, learn three words: the above thank you and please/you’re welcome, and “Kalimera,” for good morning. You will always get a response, and often a look of appreciation. For good measure, say “Yamas” as you raise a glass.
A bit about the tourism footprint
I have no desire to return to the Mediterranean. This is a sad thing to acknowledge, as the Med, to me, is one of the most appealing regions anywhere, with its ideal climate, beautiful landscapes, and deep history. But it’s appealing to the rest of the world, too, and the rest of the world is there. Where once were fishing villages, now are tourist towns bustling with all the things tourists are expected to want. Many of the locals are not really locals, but Athenians who arrive for the season to serve the likes of me, and go home when the season ends. I’m fed up with it, tired of trying to imagine what it might have been like before mass tourism collected a stamp at every destination and left behind much more than footprints.I know full well that I contribute to the problem. And I don’t want to do that anymore.
Before the advent of AirBnB and hotel booking aggregators, I used to find actual B&Bs, rooms in people’s homes, where we’d have breakfast in a dining room converted from a family parlour, served by the family itself. We used to have conversations with our host families. I can’t find those places anymore, though I imagine they’re still there, buried among the thousands of listings on Booking or TripAdvisor or Agoda or what have you. I just don’t know where to find locals now, and I grieve the loss.
If I’m to travel again (don’t fool yourself, Mullins, you will!), I want to go where the crowds don’t. I want to go where local people are living their lives, where I can disappear in the crowd, where there isn’t a trinket store to be found. Maybe northern Europe, like Germany or the lowlands of Belgium (but not Bruges!) and the Netherlands. Maybe eastern Europe or the Caucasus. I have to find places where the history hits me deeply, because I realize that’s what I travel for: to get the stab to the heart I feel in knowing that people, my human ancestors, have walked there for centuries if not millennia.
For now, home feels good. And I plan to stay here for a good long while before I start to plan the next adventure. Or so I say!
