Sarah It all started when I took a trip to Italy during the summer of 2018. It was a place I had dreamed of going as long as I could remember, and being naturally inclined to researching and organizing, I planned to know exactly what I was going to do and see before I got there. I wanted to study the historical, cultural, and natural significance of every site, artifact, street, square, and fountain, so that when I was standing before each marvel, I would be able to fully appreciate its significance. I didn’t want to rely on a guide or a clunky tour group, both of which I thought would take away from my experience. It’s not that I wanted to be alone, in fact, I wanted to share the excitement with my husband. It seemed that the only way to achieve all this was to do hours upon hours of research and carefully map out a detailed itinerary with every moment prepared and explained.
Sounds pretty Type A, right? LOL. Ask any of my close friends, and they’d tell you that one of my favorite hobbies is “relaxing”, or maybe “napping”. In school, my modus operandi was to do the bare minimum to achieve the results I wanted. And yet, when it comes to learning about a new place in preparation to visit, I can happily spend hours gathering information, learning about the culture and history, and making plans.
Even so, as I was faced with the monumental task of absorbing the entirety of Italian history and culture from the ancient Roman empire to the present day, I resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to do all of it myself. So I went back to my school habits and began searching for a shortcut. Enter the PBS and NPR demigod, Rick Steves. I grew up in a home without cable tv (I know, right?!), so I was already familiar with everyone’s favorite jocular American tourist in Europe, and a quick Google search turned up not only his many guidebooks and robust website, but also lead me to a downloadable app which contained a number of self-guided audio walking tours through the cities and museums I would be visiting. The walks looked to hit most of the spots I had pinpointed in my research, so they looked like a promising solution.
I convinced my husband to give the audio tour a try during our first day in Naples, and, dear reader, it was amazing. It was like having all the information about my surroundings I could have desired, and would have spent hours compiling on my own, fed right into my brain, at the exact right moments. He told me to look down to see the cobblestones that were part of an ancient Roman road, and I was standing right on them. Rick told me to look up to see the remains of stately family crests in the buildings that were once palaces and are now apartment blocks, and there they were. He told me to stop and listen to the goings on of every day Italian life, and I could hear it all around me. It was like stepping into another world, enhanced by all this secret knowledge being whispered in my ear as I walked through the city.
Later, at the first of many fantastic Italian dinners, my husband agreed that the audio tour was awesome. Providing a ready-made walk that tourists could do at their own pace, hitting all the must-sees, and layering the experience with the perfect amount of interesting nuggets of history and culture to make the sightseeing an unforgettable experience…it was ingenious. “I wish it was my job to write these tours! That would be my dream!” I exclaimed, to which he pointed out that there was nothing stopping me. We decided to use Rick’s audio tours for sightseeing for the remainder of our trip, and I decided that come hell or high water I would try my hand at creating audio tours someday.
Well, then we came home, and life happened, and then the pandemic happened, and 3.5 years later I’ve finally got the time and space to start creating. I’m bringing you self-paced, audio-guided tours, so you can let me do all the work of researching and mapping out the perfect itinerary, and I can share the joy of traveling. So why the “spaghetti year”, you ask? It’s not just because of all the delicious spaghetti I ate in Italy while discussing the idea of this website with my husband–it’s also because I’ve got a few other interests in the travel space that I want to share, so I’m throwing the metaphorical plate of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. From slow TV videos to tips and advice for travel, I hope it all sticks! Thank you for sharing this journey with me.
xoxo
Sarah
