PLANNING OUR FIRST TOUR! TRAVELING WITH VIEWERS :)

If you watched our last video of us picking grapes in Italy. That was two weeks ago, and we are still in Italy.

Sam.

Come here.

You'll be in the video. Come on.

Okay. Okay.

See you later. If you're not a regular viewer of the vlog, we started traveling full time at the beginning of 2016, and it's our goal to visit a hundred countries by 2019. We're currently at 62 countries, and because we're trying to go to a hundred countries, we rarely ever return to the same place more than once. But Italy's been an exception.

We normally make a video pretty much every day. So it's been kind of weird not vlogging the last two weeks, but it's because we've been busy planning a Vespa tour for 2018. You're probably wondering how two YouTubers end up planning a Vespa tour. So I feel like we need to back way up to the very beginning and tell you the whole story.

So we came to Italy for the first time earlier this summer. We spent a few days in Rome, which was awesome but hectic and, like, filled with tourists. Then a couple of our friends invited us to come stay on their vineyard in a small region of Italy called La Marche. And it's like, out in the countryside, there's tons of little hill towns, and the best part is, there's no tourists.

We really had no idea what to expect when we came here, but we completely fell in love with this place. The vineyards and the people and the food, and most of all, there's nobody here. We felt like we had found this hidden secret of Italy. Our favorite part, though, was definitely riding the Vespa around all the different hill towns, and it's just amazing. We could not believe how much we loved it.

So Bob and Gina let us borrow their Vespa to drive down to the beach one day. And after that day, we just kept looking for more and more excuses to get back on the Vespa. So we'd take it, and we'd drive to Hilltown, and we'd get gelato, and it was just like this fantastic, local, authentic experience. So by the time we left Italy, we were already trying to figure out how we could come back. And we really wanted to bring our friends and family back because we had had so much fun here. We wanted them to be able to experience it. And then the idea just started snowballing.

So Nate is a dreamer. He's always coming up with these crazy ideas. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. And at First, I thought this was just another crazy idea, but we kept talking about it and couldn't stop thinking about it. And then we realized that we could actually do this.

So after talking about it for weeks, I sat down one night and I sent out an email to our email list just to like, gauge people's interest of if maybe they would be interested in coming on some sort of Vespa tour to Italy next summer. And we got flooded with positive responses.

We couldn't believe it. We really had no idea what we were doing. It was just an idea.

We literally had people saying, like, take our money. We want to come on the Vespa tour. So at that point, I called Bob and Gina, who are friends that live here, and I was like, people are serious about this. What would it actually take to make this happen? And then we just started the conversation because it was a really fun idea. And then we were like, oh, we're actually planning a tour, taking money from people. We need to get serious about this. And there were a ton of details that we had to figure out, and.

That'S what we're here doing. We are planning out the details. Originally, we were going to come here, plan the trip, and make this video, a promotional video to get people to want to come on the trip. So, however, before we even came here, Nate sent out an email announcing the dates of the first trip, and it sold out in two hours, which blew us away. But we were super excited that people wanted to come here, since it's our favorite place. Then we opened a second week and.

A third week, and we cut it off at three because we're still trying to go to 100 countries. So we have three weeks of trips, and they're all sold out except for one spot. So you that spot will probably be sold out by the time this video comes out. So instead of doing a promotional video like we had originally planned, we're really just going to catch you up on what we've been up to for the past two weeks.

You can call what we've been doing research, but really, we've just been having a super fun time in Italy for two weeks. We have been working hard, though, so.

It quickly became apparent that the first thing that we were going to need to nail down when we got here was the villa.

We needed a house big enough for all of us to see stay in. So at least seven bedrooms. Everybody have their own bathroom. It needed to have a private pool, and it needed to be in a really good location for all the places that we wanted to visit in the region.

It was a bit tricky to find, but after probably almost a week of searching, we found the perfect place.

It's perfect. It's beautiful.

So once we found the perfect villa, we could finally start focusing on the details of the trip.

And the most important part of any. Any trip, in my opinion, is the food, especially when it's Italian food. So we have eaten so much these last two weeks.

So there's two main foods that we love here in Italy. There's tons of foods that we love, but there's two that are, like, pretty specific to this region. One is prosciutto, which is cured ham, and the other is cheese and pasta and pizza. Okay, there's. There's lots of foods, but these are two that we focused on because there's, like, cheese factories and prosciutto factories all around this area. So we went and we toured cheese factories and prosciutto factories to find the most delicious and interesting cheese and prosciutto.

So in addition to going to farms where there were prosciutto and cheeses, we went to tons of restaurants in the area to see which ones we wanted to put in the itinerary because there's so many good places and we only have a week. So we had to find the best ones, which means we ate out a lot.

One thing that we hate more than anything when we're traveling is wasting a meal. Because when you're in another country, there's only so many meals that you get, and to have a bad one just.

Is such a waste.

So we did a lot of research to make sure that doesn't happen to anybody on the trip.

We narrowed it down to our favorite.

It was very hard, very hard research. We each probably weigh at least 10 extra pounds. Another key component to any trip to Italy is the wine.

So we've done a lot of wine tastings.

It was very hard work. No, I've already made that joke. The good news is there's not a lot of bad wine. We were really just choosing from, like, good to best and which ones had, like, the most beautiful tasting rooms. And then just like, the all around best experience. And we found some really good ones.

Naturally. Since we're planning a Vespa tour, we spent a ton of time on the Vespa. We've been driving around to surrounding hill towns and mapping out the itinerary. And I even learned to drive it.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, gosh. Oh, wow. It's heavy.

You got it, you got it, you got it. Ready? 1, 1, 2, 3. Go.

He's doing it. Way to go.

I did it. I'm doing it.

Stop.

I much prefer to ride on the Vespa when Nate is driving, but it was a great experience.

We have had a blast on the Vespa. We've probably spent 20 plus hours on it since. Since we've been here. There are hill towns, so behind the camera is this incredible view. I can probably see 20 medieval hill towns from where I'm sitting right now. So we had to go explore them all to find the best ones to plan out the perfect itinerary for the trip. And that has definitely been one of my favorite parts of the past two weeks.

It.

We've just ridden to one of my favorite towns in the entire region. It's called Torre de Palme, and it's this awesome medieval town that sits on a hill overlooking the ocean. And like, every little alleyway is so picturesque. There's plants growing out the windows. There's Vespas parked in the alleyway. And then you'll turn down one and you'll get a view of the sea. It's tiny. There's not been any people here both times I've been here, and I just love it. And I can't wait to take the people who are coming on the tour to this town. This is like. This will be one of the highlights.

The sun is setting.

We've taken too long to film this video. We need to move.

So the beach is only a 20 minute drive on the Vespa from our villa. And we really wanted to work in a beach day to the itinerary. So this week we took the Vespa down there and found the perfect beach spot.

But back to the food, the important stuff. No beach day would be complete without some good seafood. So we spent some time testing the restaurants down by the water, trying to find the best fried calamari.

The best kind of research.

Oh, making progress.

So we've been doing a lot of other, like, not quite as fun behind the scenes, just like, detail stuff, like trying to figure out where we can rent the Vespas, like signing contracts and paying money for stuff. We got to come up with a menu. There's just like so many little details. I kind of compare it to, like, planning a wedding. Like there were like the big things that had to fall in place. But then I have a good feeling we're going to spend from now until next summer, like, really nailing down all the nitty gritty details of the entire trip.

But we are so excited and we've had so much fun, and we definitely are taking too much credit for planning this trip right now. We could not do this without Bob and Gina.

So Bob and Gina are the people who live here in Lamarque, whose house that we've been staying at for the last three weeks while we've been planning this trip, who've been interpreting for us as we've gone. Because there aren't necessarily a lot of people around here who speak English, introducing.

Us to all of their friends, all their connections, it's made this process a lot smoother. And I really can't imagine doing it anywhere else without a Bob and Gina.

So this is just us publicly thanking Bob and Gina and admitting that we could not have done this without him. So that's all the research that we've been doing over the past few weeks. If you're coming on the trip, we're super excited to show you one of our favorite places in the entire world. And if you're not coming, thank you for being patient with us while we've tried something completely different.

Tomorrow we are leaving Italy. We are so sad. But it'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming. Kind of.

Not really.

We're doing something totally different that we've never done before, but that's kind of.

Our regularly scheduled programming.

That's true.

We're always doing something we've never done before.

I hope she's not saying you're not supposed to be drinking out of that fountain. Yeah.

I think she says I am supposed to be drinking out of stone.

I don't know.