Kefalonia with kids

Kefalonia works well with children, with one condition attached: you have to accept the driving. Everything good here is spread out, the roads are winding rather than long, and thirty to ninety minutes between sights is the normal range. A family that plans two things a day will have a good week. A family that plans four will spend it in the car.

The beaches divide more sharply than the photographs suggest, and the division matters if you are swimming with small children. The sheltered bays — Antisamos on the east, and the stretches near Svoronata at the airport end — are calm and shallow enough to be genuinely easy. Myrtos, which is the beach on every postcard of the island, is not that: it shelves steeply almost immediately, so it is somewhere to look at from the road above rather than a place to put a young child in the water. Going there for the view and swimming somewhere else is not a compromise, it is the correct plan.

Basing yourself at the south end near the airport helps more than it sounds. It puts a calm beach within a few minutes of the room, which means the default activity on a day with no plan requires no driving at all — and on a two-week trip the days with no plan are the ones that decide how everybody feels.

Melissani is the rare sight that works at this age. The boat ride is short, the roof is open overhead, the water turns an implausible blue, and the whole thing is over in about half an hour before anyone's attention runs out. Aim for late morning, when the sun is high enough to light the water.

The turtles at Argostoli are the other easy win, and they are a morning item — roughly eight to eleven, around the fishing boats. It is a short stop rather than an outing, which makes it a good pairing with something else on the same trip into town.

Structure the day around the heat rather than against it. Sights and beaches early, back for the worst of the afternoon, out again in the evening. Children handle a Greek July considerably better on that shape than on a northern-European one, and so does everybody else.