Trip Logistics
We planned our 2024 trip through Greece with breaks throughout, during which we could stay in apartments and live semi-normal lives for a few days between multi-day hikes. Trekking Hellas hikes are extremely well-organized and the hotels are always comfortable and hospitable, but it is tiring to move from place to place every night, and keeping up with laundry can be a challenge.
So every week or two, we’d stop someplace, live in a house, and catch our breaths. We picked our break locations for geographic convenience, historical interest, and nostalgia. These interludes were just as much a part of the trip as the hikes.
Lodging
I had several requirements for Air BnBs:
- They had to have at least two bedrooms. We both need our space!
- They had to have washing machines. (No one in Greece has a dryer.)
- They had to have parking spaces if we had a car at the time.
- They had to be close to something–a town, a grocery store, sites we wanted to see.
Fortunately, we had no trouble finding lovely accommodations everywhere we stayed, and for extremely reasonable prices. For this situation, we have a demographic transition to thank. Greece’s retirees tend to be hale, hearty, and have useful home maintenance skills. Its younger generation is Internet-savvy, proficient in English, and keenly interested in monetizing family properties. Everywhere we went, a youngish person would serve as our main online contact, but we were greeted by their parents. Parents do the cleaning and prep, and in many cases, they appear also to have done much of the construction required to bring these properties into the modern era so that they can meet the expectations of foreign tourists.
And they’ve done a great job shoehorning modern amenities into properties that weren’t built with multiple bathrooms and electric appliances in mind. Every property had air conditioning (far from guaranteed a couple of decades ago). Every property had wifi (of varying effectiveness, but there nevertheless). Every place even had a fancy coffee maker. The fact that every single one also had some weirdness (a four-floor walkup and only one key to the exterior door; super steep interior stairs; strange ancient blankets and a washing machine in the bathroom that had to be plugged in outside the bathroom door; wifi that looked strong but that didn’t actually work at all) just helped to keep us humble in the eyes of the gods.
Ferries
Book your tickets online. It is easy. You get a “boarding pass” that you can either show the guys in your email, or load into your Wallet on your phone. We never had the slightest problem, whether on the fancy Blue Star overnight ferries or on the modest coastal ferries in Crete.
Driving
Mainland Greece has a really excellent system of national roads, which closely resemble U.S. Interstate highways. The main difference is that these are toll roads.
Every few kilometers, traffic must stop to pay a toll. There are dedicated lanes for buses and trucks and commercial vehicles with passes. Everyone else goes through the pay-as-you-go lanes, paying either by cash or by credit card. We ended up keeping a credit card in the console between the front seats to have it on hand every few minutes. The tolls can add up, which might be why the national highways are so empty.
Because the national highways are toll roads, exits are limited. There are, however, regular truck stops on the side of the road where people can fuel up their cars and grab a meal or snacks. These are nicely organized and well-stocked and generally very easy to use.
All gas stations are full-service. Pull up to the pump, and the guy will come out. You need to say what you want, but “Benzini, Fill” works. “Benzene” (βενζίνη) means “gasoline”. You pay with a card right at the pump.
We only encountered these toll roads on the mainland. Neither Rhodes nor Crete has anything like them, though Crete’s northern highway has been modernized to a four-lane divided highway in a few places.
Off the superhighways, there are a range of roads, ranging from multi-lane city thoroughfares to narrow, winding country roads that pass right through tiny towns, where they serve as simultaneous regional highways, town roads, and parking areas. These situations require patience and willingness to compromise.
Parking tends to be casual. If there’s space on the side of a road, it generally seems to be fine to park there. Supermarkets have parking lots, but otherwise you can’t count on a business to have its own parking. This applies to hotels as well.
Carplay navigation usually works well, though our phones would lose signal in the mountains. When plugged in, Amy’s phone would sometimes drop Maps and start playing Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf for reasons that we never discerned. Only our Skoda even had Carplay, so this strange bug wasn’t relevant in Rhodes or Crete.
Rental Cars
We ended up renting three different cars. First, we rented a very nice car in Thessaloniki to use throughout mainland Greece. We just parked it at the start of our two multi-day hiking trips and collected it at the end. Trekking Hellas recommended that strategy; it’s difficult (maybe impossible?) to reach some of our starting points with public transportation, and though car transfers are always possible, they’d have cost as much as renting for the whole time.
Skoda is a Czech brand owned by Volkswagen since 2000. Consensus on Reddit is that Skoda isn’t a luxury brand per se, but that it does make high-quality cars on the higher end of the consumer market. We found this Skoda very comfortable and Chris enjoyed driving it. It had plenty of power! It also probably made us look German.
On the other hand, this car was by far the most expensive one we had in Greece. It was big and nice and pretty new, and we paid for the highest level of insurance. I’m not sure that was strictly necessary, but Chris didn’t want to take any chances with this one.
We relinquished the Skoda in Athens the day we caught our ferry to Rhodes. This required driving to the Athens airport. First, we had to refuel as close to our return as possible; this involved driving around the airport perimeter past the Ikea and other big box stores and almost getting stuck in the back parking area of an Exxon–mildly stressful. Then we had to figure out which parking lot to drive into. We tried the lot just past the Sofitel where we’ve stayed several times–and as luck would have it, that was exactly right! An agent met us instantly, declared the car in perfect condition, and we were on our way.
We hadn’t intended to rent another car until our last week in Crete, but ended up making a spur-of-the-moment decision to rent a Toyota Avgo for a couple of days in Rhodes. This was due to a more-or-less complete lack of transportation options near our AirBnB, but it also gave us the opportunity to do a driving tour of the entire island–a great way to revisit the places we’d been throughout our stay.
The Avgo was our worst car. By far! It was small and janky, it had no air conditioning, and the clutch was mushy. The brakes weren’t great, but that was okay because it had no power. On our tour of the countryside, we regularly collected followers on the uphills. But it did the job. And it cost under €100, a great deal.
Chris had booked the Skoda ahead of time from a national car rental agency. We’d reserved a car in Chania, Crete, but ended up canceling that reservation on the thinking that we’d do better just getting one from an agency in town. Our Cretan guide Yannis hooked us up with a local agency right on the corner of the pedestrian tourist area.
There we collected a blue Volkswagen Polo that definitely wasn’t brand new but was really fine. We rented it for six days for about €270. The Polo was somewhere in between the high-end Skoda and the janky Avgo.