Savor Tours and the Villones – featured on House Hunters Int’l TV show

Before our family moved from Seattle to Slovenia in April, we were approached by the TV show House Hunters Int’l. They liked our story of moving over to Europe to move ahead with my dreams of travel, a better life and doing the tour business full time. Both my wife and I watched this show on a regular basis and thought why not? It will be a one of a kind experience, capture our young family on video and show off this beautiful country we now call home to people around North America. We sent in the application with a short intro video of Natasha and myself.

A crew of three arrived from the UK in early June for our 5 day shoot. I’d done some work behind the camera and can honestly say I was not expecting this to be so much work. But much of it was fun, the kids were curious about it and so were the local kids in our neighborhood. I distinctly remember requesting Ridley Scott for the shoot but I guess he was busy so were given Andrea, who in addition of being a good communicator and easy to work with, got along great with my wife. It didn’t take long to warm up to Warren and Andrew, the other crew members, and our local Slovenian ‘fixer’ – Jure. Now all that was needed was the real estate agent and we were given Zarja, who made our whole shoot so enjoyable to do, even after doing take, after take, after take…

With basically good weather we began a frantic shoot all over Ljubljana, Kranj and Lake Bled. In addition to the three properties we toured (two in the center of Ljubljana and one outside the city of Kranj), we shot at the Ljubljana airport, in Kranj’s old town and at a great little spot near Trboje lake. My business partner Luka met my daughter Isabella and I for a shoot that included Preseren Square (aka the meeting point for all of Ljubljana), a fantastic gelato cafe and the famous Ljubljana outdoor market. For the episode’s finale, Luka and I brought some ex-pats from Ljubljana on a day trip to the Dornk farm near Lake Bled. Our host there, Monika, made a table of delicious food, cold cuts, farmers cheese, strudel and a lot of strong drinks including herbal schnapps and her own home-brew.  It turned out so well that I included it on many of my tours this past summer and added it to The Harvest Tour.