Overview: Chasing The Odyssey, An American Family Visits Greece

Chasing Greek legend just in time for the hit movie (The Odyssey) to come out, an American family visits Greek classic sites to connect with ancient lore and history.  Follow this blog series as I take you through numerous classic sites, all visited and photographed by the LF2TS crew as we spent nearly two weeks traveling the modern Peloponnese to immerse ourselves in classic Greek sites.  During this trip, we visited the Corinth Channel, Epidauros, Mycenae (known for King Agamemnon before and after he went to war against Troy),  Nafplio, Olympia, Delphi, Athens, Cape Sunion and the Parthenon.

In the summer of 2024 we traveled to Japan with Education First (EF) Educationional Tours as a family, loving the trip.  While we were on the trip, we learned that the group leader (a teacher) was also leading a trip to Greece during spring break of 2026.  We knew right away we wanted to go.  When the opportunity to sign up came along in January of 2025, we signed up quickly.  The Education First (EF) company runs group tours with different theme’s depending on which trip the school and individual group is interested in.  While in Japan we met another EF group with a STEM focus, while our group focused on cultural aspects of Japan.  Importantly to us, EF also allows the trip to be paid for in advance on a monthly basis for the year or even two years before the trip….meaning you don’t have to have a huge payment all at once for the trip…a positive for most families.  Since these trips are not cheap and we usually travel as a family, very small monthly payments years in advance help to amortize the payment for the trip.   But you can pay all at once, family and friends can donate to your travel account and you can apply for an EF Travel Scholarship to help pay the costs in a variety of different ways.  

For this Greece trip, we started paying in January of 2025 and paid monthly until March of 2026.  First, we had the EF Greece slideshow  and introduction via Zoom, then signed up (and started our monthly payments).  The next meeting was in-person with the group leader (a teacher) about two months prior to the trip.  Then we had the final in-person meeting about a week before the trip- ironing out details, making sure everyone had valid passports and ensuring the tip money per person was paid through the group leader….meaning the tips needed from each traveler that would eventually go to each Greek bus driver, various expert guides we had for the day and the overall onsite guide/trip advisor.  

For us, we already had current passports, so we updated our health information on the EF website and did some light research on some of the sites we would go to.  Because of our experience with the logistics of the Japan trip, we knew which parking garage we would use to leave the car near LAX and because we had to meet at LAX at 0430 in the morning…we decided to do the drive to LAX the night before and stay at a hotel near the airport, simplifying our early morning commute.

At 430 in the morning we met the group at LAX and proceeded with the various machinations involved with getting checked into the flight and getting through security.  From LAX we flew to Montreal then onto Athens on Air Canada.  

After Montreal, it was just a very, very long flight into Athens, Greece.  But at least I wasn’t stuck in the middle row and although I didn’t really sleep, it was exciting and upbeat to be going all the way to Greece to see stuff.  We would spend 5 days touring by bus, one whole day exploring Athens and another day touring 3 different Greek Islands off Athens via tour boat/ferry.  Overall, it turned out to be a neat trip and I look forward to sharing the details/photos and light history with you through this next blog series.

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