About Us

Brief History Of How We Got Started

MexicoVacationTours.com is owned and operated by Go Now Adventures LLC., a recognized U.S. limited liability company with offices in Illinois, USA and Veracruz, México.

The Founder and Director of Operations is Mike Vondruska.

Born and raised in the midwest United States, Mike had this notion from an early age of setting up tours for people who liked adventure travel. At 9 or 10 years old, he really did not have any idea as to where these adventures would be. He just thought it would be fun to make up trips for people.

Many years later, Mike became friends with someone who lived in the midwest but was originally from the Mexican state of Veracruz. On many occasions this person would tell Mike about his home state, how it had tropical rainforests, big lakes, and even a mountain with a glacier on it.

To Mike, it all sounded like a great place where you could find real off-the-beaten-path travel. In 1996, Mike was invited to tag along with this guy when he traveled down to Veracruz to visit his relatives.

Prior to that time, Mike had only been to México one time – to Cancun for a business seminar. In Veracruz, he discovered a state that had not yet been overrun with foreign tourism. In fact, it was very pristine, tropical, and outside of the major port city of Veracruz, mostly rural.

On this first trip in 1996, he remembers that he did not run into any other foreigners during his two week stay. The other thing he remembers was how friendly the local people were to him. Over the next several years, Mike would travel back to Veracruz multiple times to do more exploring.

He found excellent whitewater river rafting, monkeys living on islands in one of México’s largest lakes, very tall sand dunes for sandboarding and ATV riding, small quaint fishing villages nestled next to the Gulf of México with nice beaches, a coffee growing region, a vanilla growing region, canyon trekking in the higher mountain areas, and even 3 archaeological ruins site.

With all of his many exploration trips to Veracruz, Mike decided to start making one day and multi-days tours to advertise to adventurous travelers. So he created www.DiscoverVeracruzTours.com to promote his trips.

Mike enjoyed designing the tours and early on, made the decision to only use local guides as they would be the best at leading folks in their home state rather than him being the guide. Then in 2007, Mike made the decision to expand his tour offerings to include trips to many other regions of México.

This became a big undertaking because the size of México is bigger than all of the countries of western Europe put together. However, Mike Vondruska loved the challenge and started to carve out time in his schedule to crisscross the country visiting the many colonial cities, meeting with local tour guides in each location, checking out what hotels and restaurants were the best,
and going on the tours these guides had created to experience them first hand. Over the next several years, Mike was able to explore almost every state (there are 32) in México.

With all this knowledge and database of contacts, Mike began to design what he likes to call, México Exploration Vacations. He started creating 5 to 14 day itineraries throughout the country for folks who would like to experience México’s many cultures, its history, and its geographic beauty.

Even to this day, you will find Mike Vondruska traveling back and forth from Illinois to either his Veracruz office or to other regions of México for a total of 5 to 6 months of every year. On his travels he meets with his local guides and also goes exploring to discover more unique locations and interesting activities for his travel guests to experience.

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