Exploring The Authentic Italy: Epic Road Trip Through Stunning Italian Countryside!

In our last video we took you guys into the most amazing city of Florence here in Italy and we had a fantastic day. We're getting out of here just in time. It's starting to rain. Starting to rain. We're hitting the road. We've got a cool destination that has absolutely nothing to do with the city so let's go. All right we've got another three meter bridge here but you can see it's angled right there. Stay to the middle. Stay to the middle. All right good job snow. For those of you who are new to our channel or just started watching us, we like to take the roads less traveled. Now today we had the opportunity to take the interstate or the highway, the toll roads. It would have been an hour less, a two and a half hour drive versus three and a half hour ride. However, this ride is shorter. It does not cost any tolls but it is the windy road to the countryside and through the mountains and through the beautiful small towns and that's what we like. It's shorter in distance, not in time. Shorter in distance, not in time. It's an extra hour of driving through this beautiful countryside and the reason it's longer is because we're going to be going a lot slower. Like I said there's a lot of turns so it's not like a straight through and also there's a lot of small towns but we get views of what it's really like in Italy rather than just the big cities. Ah look at these beautiful houses. They're so diverse and you can hear the geese. i found a diamond i found a gem i found the answer without pencil or pen i saw you standing there surrounded by your friends i knew right then that i would know you to the world together i think i've known it from the start come on baby let me take you away take a little trip forever on a plane or on a train or on a spaceship to the stars so there's this little river that runs right along the road and every once in a while we catch a nice little waterfall or something like that but it's hard to video because the trees are real thick imagine after a snow melt the water's just running off this river but we also see places where the road is eroded and other things like that but this is a beautiful drive and one of the main reasons why we like to get off of the big toll roads i think we just made it over the mountaintop it looks like we got up right around 3,000 feet and uh so i would say we probably climbed maybe 2,000 2,500 feet switchbacky not super steep but super windy narrow blind corners snow's definitely getting a good arm workout aren't and the hardest part about this road well there's two the hardest part is that i can't enjoy looking out seeing how beautiful it is i get a little glimpse but i gotta focus on the road the next hardest part is these switchbacks are blind so when i come around the curve normally you'd be able to swing wide in one of these big vans or something i have to stay on my side of this narrow little road on these switchbacks and that adds a little technical difficulty to the drive little extra concentration i can tell you even though maybe like when we were going through the andes mountains the drops were steeper or the drops maybe were further they're nonetheless steeper i mean some of these are straight down and also and they've got really good system of rock fall protection all along here they've got the mesh and the screen protecting the falling rocks and the road's in really good shape so it's making for a beautiful ride through the thick forest we made the right choice at least so far happy jogger oh there's another one back up back up a little bit baby can you back up all right here we go jammed in here tight i had to stop because a couple semi trucks coming around the corner there was about two inches between the truck and the mirror and we stopped just at the right time if you look here you can see this is just a series of s curves coming down they were coming up we were coming down we caught them just in the right time otherwise we probably would have been backing up through this s curve so sometimes it's better to be lucky than good all right we got a little red light action here now we don't know if this is because it's a single lane uh blind corner or because if the road's eroded away but we're about to find out i'm sure road is eroded a little bit here and more shoving hasn't gone yet we've definitely seen worse areas than that by far but they had the good traffic control devices out and the protection so we made it through safe guys and we popped over the mountains and we found some a big opening of maybe like pasture land didn't really look like they're growing any crops up here i'm thinking pasture land and all of a sudden a little town or a commune or village up on top of the hill and you see that here in italy and what's so cool is many many most of the time they have just a big church steeple sticking up in the middle of it no matter how big or small the village is really cool i believe these are lavender fields i could be wrong i probably need to check maybe you guys can correct me if i'm wrong it might be it looked a little sagey as well but there were thick rows of some sort of herb crop as we look down to the valley and we approach this town of casa guilia we're gonna go through the town oh it looks oh it looks there is a detour we don't want to go to we made a giant big decision and we didn't share it with you guys yet so a few videos back we told you our plan we were going to drive south through italy and get on a ferry in the town of bari and head over towards albania when we pop out to do our 90-day visa reset over in eastern europe well a couple of days ago we drastically changed that we're no longer headed south now we are headed north through italy along the eastern coast or at least we're headed to the eastern coast and then we'll wrap around the bend we're gonna stop in one of the world's most famous cities i'm gonna let y'all try to figure out which one that is but we're doing that because we need to get to croatia within the next maybe three three and a half weeks because we have a very special package to pick up and possibly two packages to pick up so we'll tell you more about that as it gets closer but uh yeah everything changed so we will not be going to albania we will be going through croatia and into bosnia everything changes on a whim when you live like we life is a winding road no telling where it goes driving through days and nights won't stop for traffic lights and i i really want to know really want to know if i let me figure out where the road goes and if i'm falling down i will keep on searching for my highs you can say i lost my mind i will keep on holding my head high even if the sky is falling down jumping from cliffs so high trusting our wings to fly sometimes we're crashing down but we get up and start from the ground and i i really want to know i really want to know if i let me figure out where the road goes even if i'm falling down i will keep on searching for my highs all right there's a little bunny right there he's got black ears even if the sky is falling down but as we come through these cities and these towns sometimes we get where the buildings just push right up against the edge of the narrow roads and in some cases they even squeeze it down to one lane and you can see where the vehicles the trucks the buses the wide vehicles have hit the buildings over time and just scratch the sides but i'll tell you what there's some unique engineering feats along this drive a lot of stone structures like bridges and things like that that make this just a really kind of fascinating drive we stopped off roadside for a little lunch so we're making a little pasta primavera for lunch with a little pesto sauce the kitties are winding around they want to walk it's a little too early for that we'll wait till we get to our destination but after driving on those windy roads they're ready for one we'll grab them some grass and uh get it we'll get them a walk real soon i wonder where the leeks are more popular i don't know they're tasty little tortellini salad and a little cheeseburger sliders yummy yummy yummy all right one thing about adventuring like we do we saw these beautiful towers and castles up here in the mountains and so we're going to go investigate this might change our plans for the day but it looks pretty fascinating and worth investigating get up there yeah if you don't want to unless i don't want to stress this late in the all right unfortunately we're not going to be able to show you this oh maybe you can see kind of up there there's a castle a citadel a fortress or whatever and then there's a big sort of bell tower clock tower over there and the deal is we got up there first of all it's a little tight and uh there was parking there but it was also closed and it doesn't open till saturday at 10 so we just made an executive decision to move on we're missing the clock tower thingy on the top of the hill it looked really cool it had a nice there's a good shot of it let's see if we can get you it's kind of whited out i don't know so as we've come across tuscany we're kind of getting close to the border getting out of here we've seen a lot of olive trees and a lot of vineyards but now we're coming across these manicured trees that kind of look like apple trees and the reason why i say apple trees is because we still see red and sometimes other color fruit on them that look kind of like apples they also kind of look like tomatoes and what's weird is that there's no leaves left on the tree obviously it's you know late in the in the winter here and not sure what they are maybe we'll look it up maybe you guys can tell us not sure if they're apples or some other kind of fruit that we're just not familiar with so we were well on our way we came up on a bridge that we were too tall to fit under we rerouted it added maybe 20 minutes to our journey we've done a driver change a lot has happened in the past 15 minutes and another thing is we ended up on this very narrow two-way road where when a car is coming there is no option someone a one lane two road yeah it is designed for cars to be able to pass each other but there is no room there are trenches on both sides the only hope is find a driveway but we have maneuvered through it is now getting a little bit wider and not quite as sketchy but i think we're almost to a main road he's turning right there there he goes yeah so it has to be a lot of friendly communication on these little back roads but almost to a main road and within an hour of our campsite yeah and we're still driving through all these crazy different kind of orchards so it's farmland and we're debating on whether they're grapes or pears or apples or something else but we're getting close what are you thinking oh they just drop it in the water yeah he's dropping down there was a bunch of them up and down the river yeah they drop it down probably when the tide's coming or they probably throw some bait over there we're getting closer and closer to our hopeful campsite the terrain has definitely changed we have left the mountains and we are over on the coast of we believe it's the Adriatic sea now it's a couple of miles over that way we're kind of in a delta wetland type area and we just went over a river where we saw some flamingos and there's flamingos right there there they are anyway we just went over a river back there with some very creative fishing techniques giant giant fishing nets hung over the river where they could put them down with pulleys and some sort of like a cast net almost anyway i don't know if it'll show up but it was pretty interesting and i think obviously you can tell we're over here where we're hoping we can find some wildlife but we've got a campsite we're headed to we need to get some water for the van and uh we think we got some bad weather coming in for a couple of days so we're going to get to the campsite and regroup and go from there yeah i think they are it might be chicken all right we are just minutes from our campsite and snow was filming these fields that are covered with plastic and we looked out and we saw the ring-necked pheasants out there now we saw a couple in france we haven't seen any since but there's a bunch of them out there isn't there snow yeah there's several they're quite a ways away but right towards the end one cross the road here maybe maybe 50 or 60 yards from us but pretty cool but it's getting close to dark let's get to camp we have made it to our campsite all right we've made it to our campsite but we're dealing with yet another automatic pay system doesn't seem to be the english directions written all right so i think we pay on the way out so kurt's up there talking to the guy that i guess manages the campsite here looks like he's trying to get the scoop the rain has started we had heard it was coming in could be here for a few days we're not sure but i can tell you that this kitty right here gee what are you doing he sure seems happy that he can tell we're probably home so it looks like everything's gonna work out for us here we're hoping there's some other wildlife around here as we work our way up to a famous famous city first wildlife next i'll give you a hint probably gonna take a ride in a gondola is that an adventure oh my lord so this guy is i don't know if i can say a hundred percent italian oh he's a hundred percent italian but he was loud and he was mad because i didn't come over there right away but i couldn't hear and uh anyway it was an adventure but after i cracked a smile and a few jokes he meets too many people from the united states he was pretty cool and uh so it's twenty dollars a night they do have a shower it's two euros to use the shower so i don't even know if we'll bother using that but the twenty dollars includes electric and water and dump and all that so we can fill our tanks and dump our tanks so we can shower in the van then because we'll have plenty of water you have plenty of water so we can show them it i mean they had it's hot water shower but it's got like one of those things you stand on like and use the toilet like those squatty like where they had the hole in the ground and you squat on it so you got to stand over that take a shower i'd be afraid my foot would slide into the hole and i would toilet yeah if you're not gonna use it lord knows i'm not using that shower but we're home for the night the rain did roll in guys it was an adventure i could tell by watching kurt through the window that there was definitely something interesting going on with a little man yeah but we're gonna get settled in we're gonna call it a night and we sure hope y'all enjoy enjoyed driving across tuscany and towards the northeastern parts of italy with us today it has been a while since we just took y'all on an adventure drive and uh we had fun so we hope you did there's baby oh there's a whole family of rats kurt there's a whole family and i didn't get them oh circle back around let's get the baby we told you that rain was coming in and it did it rained non-stop for two days so we hunkered down in the parking lot of this reserve now we had come to this reserve hoping to see some pretty cool looking deer that live here but when we got here it was locked up tight so before we head out now that the rain has stopped we're gonna ride through here see if we get lucky and get a little glimpse of anything up through these trees and also see if we can see any smaller wildlife along the canals and stuff we're in a river delta area close to the coast and uh we're a little bit sad we can't get in here and do a hike in the real nature because other than this little plot of land right here this entire area is farmland but maybe we'll see something as we're driving out towards the main road locked up tight these canals oh there's one are full of what we're pretty sure is carp yeah is it birds or rats on the interstate to ride along the po river and it paid off we spotted a pheasant now we didn't have time to get the tripod set up so it may be a little bit bumpy but it was a nice road to uh look out over the river which it's a big giant river and it's alongside all this farmland so you can see where everything's cleared but with that guys i think the pheasant is a good way to wind this video down we will see you in a few days from somewhere north of here cheers if you like this video be sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you guys know when we put out new videos and don't forget you can always follow us over on instagram to see what's going on in between videos cheers guys