Why ‘Teepee Tours’?
It’s probably the most frequent question we get. “Why the ‘Teepee'”?
Truth be told we weren’t originally a wine tour….And we only started doing wine tours as an addition to our first original tour.
5 years ago friends Andrew and Adam had a dumb and naive idea to create a Great Ocean Road (GOR) Surfing/camping Tour for international tourists/backpackers, but with a difference!
We wanted to steer away from the boring typical bus tours and create a truly social and fun way to do the GOR. We made an ad on gumtree and Facebook claiming to be a well rehearsed start up tour company, but we’re truly doing it for the first time! We got 8 people from all around the world on our very first tour. We planned and planned and tried our best to ‘fake it till we made it’..and that weekend we did our very first tour..(probably illegally).. and although planned and planned… everything went wrong! Who knew a camping trip across Victoria could go so bad?
We forgot sleeping bags, tents, the way to go, the weather was terrible, we got lost 5 times, we ran out of petrol twice, the surf was dangerous, the.. everything.. went wrong.. We took everyone back to Melbourne thinking that tour couldn’t have gone any worse….let’s NEVER do that again!….Except one thing..
The next week we had a full tour booked with referrals ?
Turns out… they loved it! And at that point we realised, it’s not always the places you go or the photos you take..or the smoothness of the itinerary… but it’s the people you meet and the stories you share…. And more relevant to this tour…. it’s the atmosphere you create for everyone while you host them. We learnt instantly that it’s the relaxed, sociable, relatable, conversational and inclusive atmosphere of the tour that made every group love it!
So we kept at it and kept getting better and better, week by week,…before we knew it we almost convinced ourselves we were business owners. Then one day we went to Bluesfest Festival in Byron Bay and saw a campsite full of Native American Teepees… and our jaws dropped… How cool are these?!
Imagine if we had one of these set up permanently instead of using crappy pop up tents?! What if we get one? Where can we get one?!!
Keeping up with the young, dumb and naive theme that was our early 20’s, we inquired how to get one, and we were given directions on how to get to a lovely old hippy couple, Sue and Don, in Daylesford, Victoria. When we decided to get one with no thought of the future.
Teepee Tours was born.
A new direction
3 years later we wanted to expand our reach and started thinking: what else is fun near Melbourne? Then Winery tours came to mind. So we wanted to apply the same method of being relaxed, non-touristy, letting you control the tunes and making the day up as we go….And once again..we got a little better week by week, until we realised we offered something truly unique in the Yarra Valley too – a wine tour where we make it up on the day, where YOU decide where we go.
As time went on the GOR got a little harder to do each time : with such long drives, camping in the rain, the wind ripping our teepee, the unsustainable partying..5 years had caught up to us…….and with age, the chaos that was running an overnight 2 day camping trip started to seem like a lot of work…(Geez we have some stories)
…..and all of a sudden the Yarra Valley started to feel like our new home.
We started to really love wine, love the people, the landscape, the experience, the food, we loved meeting a slightly different market too! We would be out here everyday getting to now the region and learning where is good, where isn’t good, what’s best for what kind of person…And that shows in our product today- Whoever you are, wherever our from, whatever you’re into, we know how to make you have the perfect day away from your normal.
Yeah we may have gotten into wine tours for all the wrong reasons, but let us show you what we do best…
What we’ve got
24 Seat Bus
This is the biggest size we can do!
12 Seat Bus
For Smaller groups
Private car
For a couple and/or a third wheel!
What we’ve achieved
600
5 Star Reviews
2500
Tours completed
1
Flat Tyre
