I thought it would be good to update you guys on how the trip went in regards to what I was asking about here. I'll start with the phone.

The first day we got to Athens, we decided to walk around the Plaka to see the sites and take in the city. While doing so, we made sure to keep an eye out for any store that sold phones. We eventually found a shop on Syntagma Square (where their parliament building is). They were clearly very comfortable with selling SIM cards to tourists, and the person we worked with spoke excellent English.

She also spoke excellent "up-sell" There were dozens of options we could add to our prepaid plans, all tiered out very well. We could get 1, 2, 3 or more GB of bandwidth. We could get Greece-to-Greece and Greece-to-USA minutes in 100 minute blocks. We could get texts in various increments (can't remember, we didn't get any). We ended up with 1GB of data for my wife, 3GB for me since I wanted to stay in touch with my clients back home just in case. We also got some minutes for calling between phones (even though we didn't plan to split up much), and we got minutes for calls home.

I can say with absolute certainty that 1GB is way more than you need if you aren't using Netflix or Youtube. When I got there I disabled everything on my phone that automatically transferred data for me (Google+ and Dropbox photo uploads, Doggcatcher podcast downloads, etc). I then used the phone for ALL navigation, checked email all the time, browsed the web a ton, all the normal stuff. I was regularly looking up information about things we were seeing. None of this added up to more than about 500GB.

So why did I run out of data by the end of the trip?

Well, our first hotel claimed to have WiFi access, but it was terrible. The data speeds weren't enough to get pretty much anything done. So I foolishly decided to tether my laptop to my phone because I desperately needed to use my laptop for something. Now, I thought I'd disabled Dropbox and the Google Drive app on my laptop, but it looks like that wasn't the case. Soon enough my phone is giving me the bandwidth alert I'd set to 2.3GB, and I immediately stop the tethering. Naturally, this was about two days into our trip, and I'm freaking out because we still have another 12 days and I only have 700MB left.

Thankfully, I ran out on our very last day of sight seeing, and that only happened because I decided to download a podcast for our flight back to Athens from Santorini. My wife still had plenty of data left, so I figured we would be fine and I was right.

So yes, I think 1GB is plenty, but get more just in case