Athens, Delphi & the Argolic Coast

You're met at Athens airport and driven straight to a centrally located family hotel, with the rest of the first evening free. The next morning, a guide takes you through the city's headline sights — the Panathenaic Stadium where the modern Olympics were reborn in 1896, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Hadrian's Arch and Syntagma Square — before climbing the Acropolis itself. Up close, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Parthenon earn every superlative written about them, and the new Acropolis Museum afterwards gives the stones their story back. The afternoon is left free for the Plaka's backstreets, or simply an ice cream in the shade.

A full day out of Athens, driving north through the plain of Boeotia and the towns of Thebes and Levadia before climbing into the mountains around Arachova. Delphi itself sits on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in a landscape that makes it obvious why the ancient Greeks believed this was the centre of the world — the Sanctuary of Apollo, the Athenian Treasury and a museum holding the bronze Charioteer, one of the finest surviving works of classical sculpture. Lunch is taken in the modern village, with its own view back down the valley, before the drive returns to Athens by the same mountain road.

If your dates land on the 28th of October, the morning is given over to OHI Day — Greece's national holiday marking its wartime refusal to bow to fascism — with military and school parades filling Syntagma Square, followed by lunch at a local tavern. By late afternoon you're transferred to the port of Piraeus for the ferry south to Porto Heli, arriving on the Argolic coast for a private transfer to Hotel Rozos. What follows is genuinely unstructured: days at leisure by the hotel's stretch of coast, with the option to add a day trip to the nearby island of Spetses, a private tour to ancient Corinth, a rib boat cruise to Hydra, a guided visit to Mycenae and the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, or further afield to Monemvasia or the Peloponnese wine country — as much or as little as the family wants.