Getting to and around Kefalonia

The flight from Athens is the easy part. It runs about an hour, lands you at EFL outside Svoronata on the south of the island, and puts you within a few minutes of the beaches at that end — which is why the airport end of Kefalonia is a more reasonable base than its size on a map suggests.

The car is the part that needs deciding before you arrive. Kefalonia is the largest of the Ionian islands and its best-known places sit a long way from each other: Melissani and Sami on the east, Myrtos on the north-west coast road, Assos and Fiskardo further north again, Argostoli in the middle. Public transport between them is sparse enough that planning around it means planning around its timetable rather than around the island.

Book an automatic well before July. This is the single logistical mistake worth naming, because it is the one with no recovery: automatics are a minority of the fleet, they sell out weeks ahead, and arriving to find only manuals left is a problem you cannot solve on the day. The local firms are worth a look alongside the airport desks — several will deliver to EFL at no charge, which removes the terminal counter from the arrival entirely.

Expect the drives to take longer than the distances imply. Thirty to ninety minutes between the main sights is the realistic range, and the reason is the roads rather than the kilometers — coastal switchbacks that are pleasant to drive and impossible to hurry. The north of the island in particular rewards leaving earlier than seems necessary, which pairs conveniently with wanting to be at Myrtos before the light goes hard anyway.