Driving in Greece

A US driving license is recognized in Greece, and an International Driving Permit is not a legal requirement for a US license holder. The complication is contractual rather than legal: a rental company can ask for one under its own terms even where the law does not, so the question worth answering before you travel is not "does Greece require it" but "does my rental company". An IDP costs about twenty dollars from AAA and takes minutes, which makes it cheap insurance against a desk clerk with a stricter policy than the statute.

Book an automatic early, and treat July as a hard deadline rather than a busy period. Automatics are a minority of the Greek rental fleet and they sell out on the islands well before the month starts. On Kefalonia in particular the choice in July is frequently between an automatic booked weeks ahead and a manual booked today.

Tolls want cash, and specifically they want coins and small notes. The Athens–Kalamata run costs somewhere around sixteen euros in tolls across several booths, and arriving at one with only a card or a fifty is a solvable problem that is much easier not to have. Keep a handful of coins in the car from the first fill-up.

Download offline maps by region before you leave a city, because coverage is not uniform and the gaps are exactly where you least want them. The mountain sections of Laconia have genuine dead spots, and a navigation app that has quietly stopped receiving data on a switchback is a poor place to discover the limits of your plan.

Fuel up before mountain drives rather than during them. Stations thin out considerably once you leave the coast roads, and a stretch like the Taygetus crossing — around fifty-eight kilometers and roughly an hour — has far fewer options than the distance suggests.

Plan the driving times as generously as the map does not. Greek island and mountain roads are winding rather than slow, which means an unremarkable-looking thirty kilometers regularly takes an hour. On Kefalonia, expect thirty to ninety minutes between the main sights; the distances are modest and the roads are the reason.