multi country tour- starting in athens and ending in vencie

Sure, head north through the Balkan.

You plan on leaving Athens on 2nd December? This year? Probably too late for cruises, if they even run this year. They stop in Montenegro, Croatia etc. Try some of the travel agencies in Athens they might be able to help. Not the best time of year for travel in the Balkansweatherwise I would have thought.

yeah I know- not the best time of year and who know if it will even happen...but we will be over there so somehow I want to get to venice- I was thinking Croatia as well a and tour but having difficulty finding something that fit

That is rainy season in Greece.

This was 15 years ago, but June, not December. We started off in Bulgaria, a country bordering Greece, so hopefully that’s close enough for comparison. After a week and a half there, we took a flight to Venice. Flying over St. Mark’s Square and neighborhoods laced with canals before landing, at a surprisingly low elevation that provided stunning views, was a bonus. We rented a car at the Venice airport, and immediately headed east, stopping for the night in Piran, Slovenia. We made our way through Slovenia over the next 3 days, seeing Bled, Skocjan Cave, Ljubljana. We continued further south and east, into Croatia. Two nights in Zagreb, an afternoon at Plitvice Lakes Park, then down to Split and Diocletian’s Palace. We actually stayed 3 nights in Solin, the city just outside Split.

Croatia’s freeways were brand new then, and there weren’t any special permits or other requirements for driving a rental car at the time. We enjoyed driving back around the Adriatic to Venice, where we returned the car and had 3 days in Venice, staying in a rental apartment in the Arsenale neighborhood.

The weeks approaching the Holidays could be really special.

play around with different routes on Rome2Rio, it's a great site for weighing different options

good ideas- thanks

If you're thinking about doing this yourself by public transportation (driving it would yield a huge drop charge, I think), it's important to build some slack into your schedule rather than planning to arrive in Venice the night before you fly home. There's not a lot of rail service in the Balkans (though I gather Greece has more now than it did when I was last there in 1996). My experience in 2015 in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro was that buses and the rare slow train covered only about 30 mph. I took two full-day bus rides to get from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Podgorica, Montenegro, to give you an example. The buses in Croatia were perhaps a bit faster.

The Balkans are a very interesting area with many wonderful cities and other sights, but unless you have a lot of time available, you might do best to fly from Athens to somewhere in Croatia. Pre-pandemic, Aegean airlines served Zagreb and Dubrovnik. I really like Zagreb for its lovely, bi-level historic district and many art museums, but I believe it would be chillier in December than the Croatian coast--though I haven't checked on that.

I'd recommend going to the timeanddate.com website and taking a look at several years' worth of actual, historical, day-by-day weather statistics for your potential stops to see what you might feel comfortable doing in the range of weather you might run into. Even in early October I encountered significant rain in northern Montenegro and in Zagreb.

Hey, in Greece they have different raffic rules and penalties if you want to drive a car.

I've been to many countries in the area. There's lots to see and do.

1) How long do you have?
2) What places do you want to go? Between Greece and Venice, there are about 10 countries.
3) What do you like to do?
4) Private car or public transport?

With the car you have more flexibility, with the train you are more bound, and in some countries there are not so good train bindings