Terms of Travel
To maximize walking time, we scheduled several multi-day self-guided hikes through Trekking Hellas. Trekking Hellas is the biggest and oldest adventure travel company in Greece. We’d used their services in 2023 to book a hike over Mt. Parnassos and down through Delphi and were very happy with them.
Self-guided trekking works like this: Trekking Hellas books us into hotels on designated days. They provide us route cards and GPX tracks that we can use for navigation. At the beginning of each week of hiking, we would meet with one of their representatives for a discussion of the hike. Otherwise they left us alone. Every morning, we dropped off our suitcases at the front desk of the hotel where we spent the night. After breakfast, we walked off toward our next destination. While we walked, someone put our bags in a car and drove them to the day’s destination, where they awaited our arrival that afternoon.
The provided GPX files outlining the trails for each day were really valuable. Unlike our ancient predecessors, we have not grown up walking those hills. We recommend the GaiaGPS app and website, by the way, for navigation. It works great, even offline (which is valuable when you’re paying for international data roaming and often don’t even have signal to pay for).
It’s a great system, and it means we can hike with light packs. Many days we carry only water, phones, and maybe sunscreen. We’ve never had a problem with items going missing, even when we pack computers in our bags.
In between treks, we stayed in AirB&Bs or with friends. My requirements for rentals included at least two bedrooms (staying in hotel rooms half the time provides sufficient togetherness), a washing machine (you will find no dryer in Greece), and a kitchen. We had some amazingly comfortable rentals for shockingly low prices.
We also needed a parking space if we expected to have a rental car.
Most of our rentals came with cats, gratis.
Two nights we slept on ferries travelling to and among the islands of the Aegean. Ferry cabins are an amazing deal, combining accommodation and travel for two in one price and in facilities that are infinitely more comfortable than airports and airplanes: Wifi, coffee shops, bars, white-tablecloth restaurants, en-suite bathrooms with showers!
Our itinerary was designed to cover as much of the modern nation-state of Greece as possible while also avoiding Athens. We started in the north in early September, and chased the summer down into Crete, where we could still swim in late October.