Why Hiking Italy’s Apennine Mountains Is the Destination Travelers Don’t Know They’re Missing When people dream of Italy, they usually picture Florence, Rome, or the Amalfi Coast. Iconic places, without question — and often crowded, fast-paced, and familiar. But there’s another Italy.A quieter Italy.One best discovered slowly, on foot, along historic mountain paths where daily Continue Reading →
Tag: Italy
Where are the Apennine Mountains?
Where are the Apennine Mountains? That is a question to which most Americans do not know the answer. Almost No Tourists We recently ran our first tour in the Apennine Mountains, a seven-day hiking adventure. From the moment we left our meeting city to the point we reached our final destination, we saw only two Continue Reading →
Comparing our European Hiking Adventures
We have five different walking, hiking, or trekking adventures in 2026. How should you choose which to join? Outside of just picking a location because it appeals to you, a great step is to compare the difficulty of the five tours. How to Judge Hiking Tour Difficulty In judging the difficulty level of hiking tours, Continue Reading →
Join Allan on Two Exploratory Tours in August
We are moving forward quickly with our new Exploratory Adventures. These Exploratory Adventures are first-run tours to less-traveled destinations in small groups, generally led by our founder and owner Allan Wright. We recently added two new Exploratory tours to our schedule for this coming August – plus we have two more already on the schedule. Continue Reading →
Self-Guided Tours
We at Zephyr Adventures have been offering self-guided tours for decades but in 2025 are focusing on them by offering eight new self-guided hiking and biking itineraries. Self-guided tours are very popular among Europeans. What is a self-guided tour? We make your hotel reservations, provide route directions via GPS, bike rental on biking tours, and Continue Reading →
The Dreamscape of Tuscany on Foot
One of the best aspects of running a tour company is getting to know small regions of the world really well. I can’t say I know all of Europe or even all of Italy, but in the areas we run tours, we get to know the paths, hotels, restaurants, people, and culture fairly intimately. In Continue Reading →
Active Yet Easy Vacations
We like to provide a range of activities on each of our tours, to accommodate all ability levels. We try to ensure that each hike or bike ride has several route options – easy, medium, and hard, when possible. But when you take a look at our itineraries overall, there are some that are more Continue Reading →
Important Life Lessons Learned From Italy
Italy is many things to many people – a wine and food heaven, an art and architecture paradise, a cultural delight. To me, Italy is all those things but more specifically it is a place of learning and self-discovery. Last year, I had the honor and pleasure of guiding the Tuscany and Cinque Terre Bike Continue Reading →
5 Interesting Facts About the Island of Sicily
As you may be aware, this year is Zephyr Adventures’ 20th Anniversary and to celebrate we added five new adventures to our schedule, including the Sicily Bike Adventure coming up this fall.  As we gear up for our inaugural tour of this iconic island, we thought it would be fun to share a few fascinating facts about Sicily: Continue Reading →
Cooking Class in Puglia, Italy
One of the main goals of our tours is to throw in cultural experiences in addition to the physical activity. In Italy, this almost always means having a private cooking class for our group. Puglia is not as “advanced” in tourism as its provincial neighbors to the north, Tuscany and Umbria. And this is part Continue Reading →