Here I go again trying to figure out how to "do Greece."
I'm looking at a trip with (I think) 18 full days on the ground in greater Greece (not including inbound or outbound travel days), mid-September to early October. I have found trip planning for Greece to be fraught with so many tricky choices and gotchas, and have adjusted my scope of this trip so many times I can hardly keep track of them. Right now, my parameters are fairly flexible, other than the following:
We have to include 3 days on Santorini, for Dear Wife. Me, I think I'd be perfectly happy skipping Santorini entirely, but we all have to compromise. Wife says Santorini is non-negotiable. She's leaving everything else up to me, so I consider it a perfectly acceptable tradeoff, and if she's not happy, nobody's happy. I'll do my best to enjoy our three days there on Santorini with ten thousand friends.
We are entirely skipping Athens (and the entire Greek mainland) this trip. We will get to them, and other places, on a subsequent trip to Greece. Just limiting the scope so we can be efficient with our time, and do places better.
We will be flying directly to some island (likely Crete), and then flying out at the end (probably from Santorini) to/from other cities in Europe (not finalized yet but I have a list of candidate cities that will work).
Crete is big. Crete has a lot of things to see. We could probably spend months exploring Crete, but we don't have months for this trip. We'll have about 15 days, once we subtract 3-4 for Santorini. We will be returning to Greece another time (probably multiple times on other trips), but there's so many places to explore in Greece (I do like islands...) that maybe we won't be back to Crete, so I want to do it right - if we do it this time. We will rent a car there, in hopes of getting all around this large island (5th largest in the Mediterranean).
I could easily see us spending all 15 non-Santorini days just on Crete. But there are so many other sirens that call to me, I feel like I need to put wax in my ears AND lash myself to the mast.
So my specific questions:
What's the "right" number of days to dedicate to "the island of the gods"?
Is a trip primarily focused on Crete (with a serving of Santorini on the side) a good introduction to Greece (or at least, to the Greek islands)?
Our interests are fairly typical for Ricknics. History, scenery, natural beauty, culture, food, etc., we're not so much for beach time (though we will go dipping and probably snorkeling occasionally, if the water is as beautiful and appealing as advertised). We're SCUBA divers but probably won't be willing to haul our SCUBA gear to Greece and back (we're spoiled by diving Indo-Pacific waters).
If we don't center this trip on Crete (if we skip Crete entirely this trip), we could do a handful of islands around the Dodecanese and Cyclades instead, but I know the logistics of island hopping can eat days, so I'm trying to be be cautious about that.
Thanks for any insights you can share.