Greece With Kids: Thoughts and Tips Before The Trip

I’m sitting in the Montreal airport, after arriving at LAX this morning at 0344 and leaving on a 0800 flight. We’re enroute through to Greece as a family, with an EF school group from our small town. I had to smile this afternoon as I browsed for sundries in one of the airport stores….lots of things are in French here. If you pay in American dollars, you get Canadian currency back…but if you use a card, you get to navigate the prompts on the machine in French. I don’t speak a bit of French, but it was fun for the few minutes I spent there. I managed to pay the self service kiosk with no problem, the prices seemingly lower than US prices which is a pleasant surprise.

There’s snow on the ground here all over the runways. What a shock to the system as I drove away from home in 101 degree weather, then we landed here with snow all over the ground and snowplows running in droves.

The EF Travel Group from our small town is smaller than we traveled with when we went to Japan a few years ago and seemingly less boisterous. We know we have nearly 9 more hours on an airplane to Greece but we’ll be flying through the night, so our sleep should work out. The trip so far has brought back lessons about traveling with kids, even though ours are teenagers…they’re still kids who need support and guidance while we still need to remember to get out of the way as often as possible.

Some things we need to remember when traveling:

Money: Our kids don’t really need to travel with lots of cash and on international trips we don’t let them travel with credit/ATM cards. Why? Really easy to lose or use waaay too easily. Especially since we’re with them, they don’t need to buy much except some personal souvenirs and sundries.

Food: Hours spent in security lines, waiting on airplanes and actually flying take their toll unless you’ve done it bunches. Don’t forget this with kids- they still need to eat or snack as you go.

Grumpy: Me and one of my daughters tend to get grumpy with less food and sleep + airline travel. I have to take things in stride and realize that people can be less communicative (go internal) when traveling, tired, grumpy or hangry.

The Plan: When we travel with kids, we try (before we leave) to mitigate things that WILL try to throw the trip into chaos. Experience teaches us how to plan for and plow through things like that. As soon as our well laid out plan runs up against strong winds…there’s a strong chance that pieces of it won’t survive. Yes, the plan could go to shit really easily and it’s our job to be around to call the audible and roll with the changes. We’re also trying to teach the kids to be able to be resilient enough to roll with the changes.

Greece With Kids: After The Trip

We just finished ten straight days traveling Greece with our kids, so I feel this qualifies me to write this overview and then start writing about the various travels and sites we visited, mostly the Hellenistic Classics with a few tourist destinations thrown in for fun. As I’ve already alluded to in my first quick overview, we took the trip with a school affiliated student travel company called Education First (EF). We flew to Greece as a group and spent 6 days straight moving to different classic sites by bus (different hotels every night) then then spent three days straight in Athens exploring the sites there. Then we flew home. There’s a lot more involved in that last simple sentence than you might think, aside from just getting to Greece via airplane (a 20 hour endeavor). Luckily for us, EF does the logistics for us (part of what you pay for) and the tickets, expert site guides, in-country tickets, hotels, luxury tour buses, tour director and a hundred other moving pieces of logistics are worked and taken care of so the students can travel safely to the various sites included in their trip.

But each country is different and fun…coming with various customs and quarks you might not know about ahead of time that you can pick up on a website like mine…which is exactly why I write these posts. We travel with our kids and write these posts to give you information when you decide to travel with your own kids or take your own trip. So here’s some things I picked up in Greece that would have been fun to know before I went, but I just didn’t find a website ahead of time with this kind of quarky info on it.

Touch: Greek men will sometimes use touch during conversations or discussions when emphasizing important points or to get attention. This might be something Americans are not used to and could be construed as an invasion of privacy or worse. This is cultural and unless the contact is very unwanted or aggressive, folks should just be aware that for the most part it’s harmless. Most of the tour guides have been warned that other cultures may not like the touch and few do it anymore.

Cats and Dogs: If you have allergies to cats or dogs, bring your allergy meds. Cats wander the streets in greater numbers than I’ve seen in other countries and are concentrated in tourist areas and ruins, but are not pets. Since they are tolerated and in some cases fed, they are prolithic. There are dogs too, but not as many. Again, they are not pets but they are treated well in the tourist areas so they stay there, probably cared for by the locals (who won’t admit to it). But one will often spy a water/food dish around the back or partially hidden.

Crowds and Tour Buses: We rode a tour bus with our group to the different Hellenistic sites and counted numerous buses at each site. Some of the sites are so spread out that we could only hit one major site per day and seemed to be on in synch with other EF groups also on spring break in the US who were touring sites as well. But the Hellenistic sites are not all easy to get to and some are far from Athens, so it takes a commitment to go…thus they are not all overly crowded. This is nice, especially when you are able to get going and arrive earlier in the mornings…as sites tend to fill up over the late morning and definetly in the afternoons. We usually did our bus rides early but often had to drive more than an hour from where we stayed to various sites, but the tour directors and guides have the timing down to a science, so they know when you need to leave and drive ect ect.

Athens was another story. For our visit to Cape Sounion, we arrived before the site opened…and we were the only folks there. But this temple and destination are not as popular as the rest of the Athens scene so we were lucky and also had a spot of great weather right on the coast at the farthest southern point of mainland Greece. The sites in Greece are another story…like I said. We toured the main site of the Acropolis/Parthanon with literally thousands of our newest friends. The hike up the Acropolis was like a cattle call, with hundreds in line to the point our guide could not find room to pull the group over to the site to do her expanations and when we did, we had others trooping through the middle of the group. But the top of the Acropolis is larger and more spread out, so I felt less pressured up there and then on the shorter hike off the site. But the hike up with so many people so close to me caused some minor anxiety and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. The Musuem of the Acropolis was crowded also, but required tickets at specific times so some of the crowding was more spread out. It worked out and we were able to see as much as we wanted.

How to do it: To make your visit to the Acropolis less crowded/busy….think ahead. Consider buying tickets ahead of time for specific times/places and think about whether you really want to be up there at sunset or sunrise, as I’m told those are busy times as well. Also consider the heat of the day- there’s NO water on the top of the Parthenon at all and theres only one (1) bathroom on the whole site, which you must down hike to get to. Then you stand in line with 30-40 of your friends to wait to get access to the small bathroom.

The Musuem: Buy tickets ahead of time, as you will proabably not be able to walk in and get into the museum. Get a time slot that works for you and show up early, expecting crowds. Then give yourself at least an hour or more to do the three floors of the building with so many antiquities to view. Keep your ticket, as there’s a viewing area you can get into with the ticket on the third floor.

Time Change: Greece goes through time changes. We were in Greece for one of the time changes, it happens.

Sundays: Lots of things are shut down on Sundays in Greece but not so many in the tourist destinations. If you are touring and go through some of the very small towns, just be aware of that some things could be shut down.

Religion: Most of the Greece belongs to the Greek (Eastern) Orthodox Religion. This didn’t have much effect on our tour….except for a religious holiday and Greek Independence day falling smack dab in the middle of the week. Then things did shut down in the town we were staying in and we had to adjust our schedules. But it was a great parade and the weather turned better, so things worked. Point Here- google the major holidays to see if any fall during your visit.

Greek Island Tour: I’m not sure I’d do the Saronic Gulf Island tour with family if we had not been with the group. That’s not to say I don’t still want to go to Santorini, Lesbos or Delos….but I’m not sure the islands outside of Athens are worth a full day and the money to go if you don’t have specific purpose. But….if you just want a day away from the hustle and bustle of Athens and a whole day on the Mediterranean with some quick island stops sounds like a soul soothing experience….then this tour is for you.

Greek Cooking Class: We were told we could take a Greek cooking class and had to make a quick yes/no decision the day before the class. So we voted yes. I had visions of learning to make yummy gyro’s. This didn’t happen but it was a kids school-age tour…not a cooking school for old people. Moral of the story….if you are on a tour and a cooking class is offered; there’s no harm in asking for more details.

Ok, so now my entire series on our Greek Trip throughout the Peloponnese and back to Athens with the EF Tour Group is finished. If you want to read those individual stories, you can click the links below to go right to those stories. This was an exhausting, fun, informative trip that I would DEFINITELY go on again….no question about it. I loved visiting these sites and starting to understand more about the history that has shaped Western Civilization from the Bronze Age forward.

We’re a small website that focuses on travel with family and family related adventures….plus anything else I really want to write about. We love our readers and our followers and hope you will consider reading, liking and following our stories. Have a great weekend. PS: Happy Halloween.