I once heard it said that the road to success is not a straight line; and that is certainly true on how we came to form Andiamo Adventours.
Ironically, when I was growing up my father would not allow me to have a bike as he would say he was once hit by a car as a kid while riding a bike; blah blah blah. And today I am co-founder of a Bicycle/Hiking tour Company.
Looking back I would say the idea took root when my uncle came out to visit from St Louis, Missouri. I was 10 yrs. old and he was 20. We were tossing the baseball out back and he told me how he planned to ride his bicycle across America. I froze in disbelief and said ” Is that even possible?” His response was a confident “of course it is, you can ride a bike around the world”. I was impressed, to say the least, and never quite forgot this proclamation. Then one day more than 10 years later; I met a woman in Costa Rica that I would one day ask to marry and made my way to Switzerland to do my best to convince her. It hit me then that I never did ride a bike across country; so now was my chance to ride across a county; any country would do. So I picked Denmark. I loaded my bike on the plane flew to Switzerland and stated I was on my way to Denmark to cross the country and would come back to Switzerland once achieved. Well I achieved my goal and decided to cross England, the Netherlands and ride down the Rhine River before my return. Once back in Switzerland the two of us decided to do a bike riding adventure together. She loved everything Italian and we set our sights on a joint venture covering the entire coast of Italy; including Sicily and Sardinia, the interior between Florence and Rome and for good measure the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain & Portugal and the Gallicia region of Spain and north coast of Portugal and its interior. We enlisted a good friend, Drusiano Solari to help with project. Dru met us in Rome and took on Spanish Med-Coast as well as the Southern Portugal coast up to Lisbon, where we all regrouped after 8,000km in 4 months of riding while documenting our elevation changes to create profiles and distances and collecting tourist information of cultural & lodging brochures that we planned to organize/publish a guide book for cyclists wishing to follow our adventure.
Well, it was a mountain of data and in those days, manually doing this was a bigger task than the riding we’d done. As the project lost steam; a good friend, Cheryl Jensen, who worked at North Star ski resort, encouraged us to lead biking tours instead. She asked Cornelia to attend an active travel trade show with her in San Francisco to see what was possible. Our idea was to make a resume for Cornelia, who spoke 5 languages, was beautiful and cultured, and apply for a job to learn the ins and outs of guiding, While I worked on building the administrative part. She had 5 offers from the trade show and took the one in Napa Valley so she could be near my home in Santa Cruz. Her first tour she had just bought some spd clipless pedals; which were a new thing at the time. Prior to this we had done our journey using the clip & strap pedals. Well, sure enough on her fist tour she led she fell not able to unclip and the guests had to lift her upright to unclip. Embarrassed, but not defeated. None the less, the job was not a fit for Cornelia and it was time for her to return to Switzerland. She decided to pursue her next choice and contacted Progressive Travel. She immediately clicked with owner Dominique & his staff. Cornelia told Dominique her plans of starting her own tour operation and he was good with it. Of course he knew what we learned; it’s easy to have a dream, but a lot of work that no one likes to do to realize the dream, so unlikely it ever happens.
Well, we did all the work no one likes; then came the first challenge; what to call ourselves. Our team was Cornelia, myslef, Dru and two friends from Santa Cruz who had a lust for travel; Sam and Dwight. The internet was new in 1997 and our neighbor who was building web sites offered to trade two tours for building us a site. We had no idea how search engines would work and assumed like phone books; alphabetical. So, our name could be anything starting with the letter, A. We came up with 100 generic dull names and after several beers and not close to agreement Cornelia yells out Andiamo. We froze and said hey that is good, what does it mean. She says Le’s Go in Italian. We all laughed realizing she was just tired and frustrated with the process, but I didn’t bite and said Andiamo Adventures. Sam, being the English teacher says how about Adventours. We all agreed and toasted our new venture in 1997; or should I say Adventour…
It wasn’t long before Dru said he was out with other travel interest he would rather pursue and Dwight soon followed suit with a need to build a house with his new wife expecting their fist child. That left 3 of us and we chased the dream. I painted houses and substitute taught; while Sam continued his teaching and Nel taught in Switzerland & guided for Dominique in France while we kept our hopes up that our web site would bring in some clients. Finally a couple from Denmark responded and wanted to do our Big Sur bike tour and we were rolling. Not long after that we had a group of 5 that became 3, wanting to do our Swiss Complete tour. Sam ran the California Big Sur trip with his wife Deanna and I went back to Switzerland to help Nel run our first Swiss trip. It wasn’t much, but it was a start and we were soon headed into winter and hoping 1998 would be boom times.