Zicasso Travel Stories: The Toast a Family Never Saw Coming

That trust didn't happen overnight. Their first trip together came around Bob's 60th birthday, a milestone the two of them decided to mark in Ireland, joined by Bob's three grown daughters. Bob went into the planning nervous about the pace. He didn't want the trip to be over-scheduled and made a point of saying so early on, worried a big family trip built around a birthday could become too much. The itinerary that came together built in the downtime he wanted, alongside everything else, and the trip landed during the one stretch of the year when Ireland saw sunshine every single day, 10 days of it, entirely by chance.

A driver named PJ took the family out from Dublin and back again, and became something closer to a member of the trip than a transportation detail. He and the family stayed close enough afterward that PJ has talked about visiting them in the United States when he makes his cross-country motorcycle trip someday.

After Ireland came Norway, the trip during which Linda and Bob first connected with Marci-Beth, their Zicasso travel advisor. That trip started with a different plan. They were set to meet family in Amsterdam, who intended to stay longer than Linda and Bob wanted to commit to that particular stop. Instead, they met their family in Amsterdam for a few days and brainstormed where to spend the following June week. Norway won. They expected it to be beautiful. What they didn't expect was just how striking it would turn out to be or how memorable the impossibly small places they stayed in would become; one property had just eight rooms, another only six; places neither of them would have found or thought to look for without someone steering them there.

Then came Italy, the elopement and honeymoon that pulled together everything Linda and Bob had learned about how they like to travel and who they wanted planning it with them.

Long before northern Italy entered the conversation, Linda and Bob knew two things: they wanted to elope and they wanted to do it on their terms. Rather than default to a hometown ceremony or a destination chosen because it was popular, they spent real time discussing what kind of wedding they wanted and how they wanted to hold it. They set the time first. They chose the five-year anniversary of their first date.

The destination took longer. Europe felt right in theory, but they wanted more than a place that photographed well. They wanted somewhere with water and mountains and sunsets that make a place feel unforgettable, somewhere a term like picturesque felt palpable, but also, critically, somewhere neither of them had been. Linda and Bob are well-traveled individually, the kind of people whose passport stamps rarely overlap, and that made the search for a shared first place surprisingly specific.

They batted ideas back and forth themselves and with Marci-Beth, who has worked with the couple across several trips and understands how they prefer to experience the world. The early ideas moved fast, and the couple quickly honed in on northern Italy, then spent time deciding between two very different settings: Lake Garda and the Dolomites. Rather than choose one over the other, they built a trip that used both, letting one location host the elopement and the other anchor the honeymoon that followed.

No one had planned for the high temperatures that summer. A heat dome pushed temperatures through the roof across Europe into territory unusual for northern Italy. It could have derailed the trip's mood. It didn't. If anything, it became one more thing Linda and Bob absorbed into the story of the week rather than let it define their time, a small reminder that even a meticulously planned trip has to leave room for the unexpected once you arrive.

Linda and Bob had been through the matching process on earlier trips and knew from experience that the fit isn't automatic. Some specialists you work with well. Others you don't click with at all. This time, they clicked almost instantly with Veronica, their Zicasso Italy travel specialist.

Veronica quickly became a genuine collaborator rather than someone simply executing a checklist. Linda and Bob had also been researching wedding planners independently and they were clear about what they didn't want: a planner who treated the ceremony like a product, churning out identical weddings on a schedule. They found a planner based in northern Italy who understood the day the couple was after. Veronica worked directly with that planner and with the couple to figure out logistics that went well beyond a typical honeymoon itinerary.

One of the bigger questions was the ceremony site. At some point in the planning, an idea took hold: what if they booked the largest suite at their hotel and held the ceremony on the site's rooftop deck? Neither Linda nor Bob remembers exactly when the idea struck, only that once it did, it felt right. The hotel was new enough that it hadn't hosted a wedding on that rooftop before, which meant Veronica wasn't pulling from an established playbook. She worked directly with the property to make it happen, coordinating details that had no precedent to follow.

Once the ceremony and the planner were locked in, Veronica turned her attention to the rest of the trip. What she built went well past a standard honeymoon itinerary. She layered in experiences and access points that Linda and Bob wouldn't have found or arranged on their own.

On June 21, the rooftop terrace of their suite on Lake Garda became, for one afternoon, the only place that mattered. Below, olive groves rolled down toward the water; above, nothing but sky and a shaded gazebo. Linda and Bob exchanged vows beside the suite's private infinity-edge pool, the lake stretching out in every direction, no one there but each other. Afterward, a driver met them for a private photoshoot through the quiet streets of the lakeside village where their hotel made its home, before bringing them back to the suite where the day had begun.

Before the honeymoon truly began, Linda and Bob raised a toast of their own, the one their families had not been aware of: word that they'd married, intentionally, on the fifth anniversary of the night they met, calling it the first day of the rest of their lives together. Then it was on to the honeymoon.

Some experiences were what the itinerary promised, but elevated by who helped lead the activity. Near Lake Garda, Linda and Bob had a cooking class built into their days. Linda assumed, going in, that it would be one of those larger group classes tourists tend to get funneled into. Instead, it was entirely private: just the two of them and a chef, learning to make tiramisu and fresh pasta from scratch.

They left with recipes, a new friend, and memories of the fresh flavors embedded into the hand-cut pasta that outlasts a trip. Months later, back home, they made the same pasta again and texted a photo of the result to the chef who had taught them. It is a small thing, if that's what you call a text message across an ocean.

"Every guide and chef we've worked with through Zicasso has been genuinely great at what they do," Linda said. "But it's more than that. We build real relationships with these people. We still keep in touch with certain guides. It's become part of how we travel."

The original plan called for a boat trip to the islands of Murano and Burano, and Torcello, followed by a fixed-menu lunch. It's straightforward on paper. What arrived was a private water taxi, a beautiful boat with its own captain ready to carry the complete party of Linda, Bob, and their guide.

They wound through the Grand Canal before landing at Murano, where their guide took them into a glassblowing studio that wasn't set up for casual tourist foot traffic. A private tour through the showroom followed and Linda and Bob ended up buying pieces to bring home before continuing on to the lunch that had been planned for them from the start.

Weeks before the trip, they had started watching Stanley Tucci's show about Italy, specifically the episodes covering the Veneto region and the Dolomites, partly for inspiration and partly for anticipation. One episode featured a restaurant outside Venice built around an unusual premise: cooking with produce grown in salty coastal soil, a specialty that shapes the entire menu. Linda and Bob watched the chef talk through the concept on screen and the restaurant's name stuck with them enough that when they checked their own itinerary later, they realized it was already part of their schedule, booked before they'd even started watching the show.

The meal ran long in the best way: officially seven courses over three hours, though, with all the small bites served between courses, it felt closer to 10. Every dish was intricate and every element on the plate, they later learned, traced back to sustainable sourcing decisions the kitchen had built the entire menu around. It is easy to say a meal was exquisite, but the specifics were what stayed with them: wine made from a grape grown nowhere else because nowhere else has soil this salty; herbs pulled from gardens they could see from their table; a kitchen that had built its entire reputation on treating the lagoon itself as the pantry.

Anyone who has planned a trip with Linda and Bob together would notice the dynamic quickly. Bob is the go-with-the-flow half of the partnership, happy to hear that something sounds great and move on. Linda wants to understand every detail before it happens, asking questions about timing, logistics, and what exactly to expect from nearly every listed item on the itinerary.

Which is what makes one particular evening stand out. Early in the planning process, Veronica had built in a night described simply as a special dinner on a private balcony, scheduled for their last evening. Linda, who admittedly asked about practically every other detail on the itinerary, never asked about that one. Maybe it was the wording, maybe it was decision fatigue after so much planning, but for whatever reason, that single evening stayed a mystery.

Then, on the night, a private gondola carried them across the water to a hotel that, from the outside, looked like the beautiful but expected palazzos lining the canal: centuries-old stone facades blending into the rest of Venice. Inside, it opened into a sleek, modern, and stylish foyer closer to a boutique hotel than anything the exterior suggested. A guide met them and led them to the top floor, where a second person took over and brought them up two more flights of stairs to a private rooftop deck.

They found a table set for two. Couches. Prosecco chilling on ice. And the entire space reserved for them with a private waiter assigned to their evening. Spread out beyond the hotel wound the Grand Canal, lit by a sunset neither of them could describe the same way twice, with music playing softly as the evening settled in.

"If we had looked for that online, we never would have found it," Bob said. "And even if somehow we had, I'm not sure we could have booked it ourselves. That's not something a search engine hands you. That's something a local person, someone who actually knows the city, makes happen. A deck on top of Venice, a table just for us, nobody else up there. Only someone on the ground could have pulled that off."

For Linda, the moment mattered as much for what it represented as for how it looked. Throughout the trip, she found herself thinking less about cost than she expected to on a trip this significant. Everything had been built into the itinerary and paid for ahead of time, which meant that at the moment, she wasn't doing any math about whether an experience had value. She was just in it.

"That's always been one of the things I appreciate about how Zicasso works," Linda said. "You build the itinerary, you land on a price that fits your budget, or you decide to stretch it a little, and then it's just done. You're not attaching a dollar figure to each individual thing as it happens. You get to enjoy it instead of calculating it."

Linda and Bob are already talking through what's ahead, though not with the rigid sequencing some travelers use. There's discussion of a girls' trip, Linda and the daughters, to Costa Rica, a place neither of them has been. There's also talk of a guys' trip to Scotland, with Linda meeting up with Bob afterward. The same planner who helped shape the Ireland trip has come up as someone who could help with Scotland too, a familiar hand for a familiar trip.

Marci-Beth has also raised the idea of what she calls the list process, a longer-range way of thinking about where they want to go next. Six to eight weeks in New Zealand and Australia sits on that list. So does a long stretch through Southeast Asia. These are not trips Linda and Bob are trying to sequence with precision the way some travelers lay out a strict order of operations. Instead, they let life point them toward what comes next, the way Amsterdam turned into Norway, the way a milestone birthday turned into Ireland, the way a five-year anniversary turned into a wedding.

For a couple who have built an entire way of traveling around people, that approach makes sense. The next destination isn't really the point. Who helps them get there and what happens once they arrive is.

"Every trip, we come home with more than memories," Linda said. "We come home with the people. Little things they said, ways they described something, end up becoming part of how we talk to each other at home. It's not something you plan for. It just happens because of how these trips are built."

Every occasion deserves the same attention, whether it's an anniversary or a graduation; our specialists and advisory team bring the relationships and the local access with meticulous care to make the experience as personal as it should be. Explore our Italy tours and vacations or begin with our honeymoon travel guide.