Our story
Seven cities.
Seven days.
What could go wrong?
We're Lilliy and Khasan. We met online in 2021, spent four years long distance, and finally ended up in the same place in spring 2025. So we did the only sensible thing: booked seven Italian cities in seven days for our first trip together.
Lilliy & Khasan, co-founders
We met online
Two countries, one very long video call that never really ended.
Long distance
Time zones, airports, goodbyes. We got very good at missing each other.
Same place
First time in the same room. We started saving immediately.
The crazy plan
Seven cities, seven nights. What could go wrong?
The plan vs. what happened
One night per city. That was the idea.
Naples → Rome → Pisa → Florence → Venice → Verona → Milan. On paper, beautiful. On the ground, well.
The one day the plan survived
The plan Land, walk Pompeii, eat the best authentic pizza in the world.
All of it happened. Pompeii by day, then pizza on a rooftop over the sea while the sun went down and Naples danced and shouted somewhere below us. We went to bed feeling like people who plan well. Enjoy that feeling with us for a moment. It does not come back.
The 9am train left at 3pm
The plan Morning train, a full day with 2,000 years of history. Khasan's dream stop.
Strikes. Six hours of delay, and we rolled into Rome at six in the evening with the Colosseum about to close. No check-in, no dropping the bags: we ran across Rome carrying everything we owned, and made it inside. First lesson of the trip: the plan is a suggestion.
Made it. Bags just out of frame.
We were supposed to be in Pisa by now
The plan Check out, move on. One night per city, remember?
There was far too much left to see, so we gave Rome the second day it deserved: the Pantheon, everything else we had promised ourselves, and a dinner that needed two plates each. Zero regrets. The schedule, however, never recovered.
The Pantheon. Still processing it.
We accidentally saw the Pope
The plan See the Vatican quickly. We were three cities behind.
The Pope appeared. People plan for weeks to catch him; we walked into it by accident and decided to take it as a blessing for the rest of the trip. Then Lilliy, who is German, talked our way into a corner of the Vatican reserved for Germans, chatting away with the guards while Khasan nodded along to a language he does not speak. He committed to the role fully and landed one loud, perfect DANKE on the way out. A true German was born that day.
Khasan woke up as a mermaid
The plan There was no plan. Lilliy declared a beach day, and the schedule could do nothing about it.
At the beach, Khasan fell asleep on the sand out of pure exhaustion. Lilliy got to work. He woke up with a sand tail, a sand chest, the full Disney mermaid silhouette. That night we slept in the castle right on the beach, and somewhere between the waves we finally did the maths out loud: five cities left, three days. The speed run was born.
Santa Severa. We slept in that castle.
The speed run begins
The plan The art, the Duomo, the whole Renaissance. Then the tower.
Two cities a day under partial rain, backpacks on our backs, cameras in our hands, a bottle quietly leaking through one of the bags. Two frustrated people speed-walking through the most beautiful places on Earth, checking boxes.
The realisation: our bags were against us. Nothing had a place, everything had to be dug for, and the wet patch was spreading.
Lilliy and Florence
Pisa, right after the rain
Beautiful. Blurry.
The plan The sunken city and its gondolas, then Romeo and Juliet's balcony.
Venice and Verona deserve days. They got hours, and they still managed to be unforgettable. Our shoulders remember it differently, because it had not yet occurred to us that luggage storage exists.
Somewhere between cities
We discovered luggage storage. On the last day.
The plan Fashion capital, victory lap, fly home.
We finally stored the bags and walked around like free people for the first time all week. Somewhere between the Duomo and the gate, we started writing the list: everything we wished we'd packed, and everything we'd never pack again. That list became this shop.
What that trip taught us
Every mistake became a rule
Tripstash is the list we started writing in Milan, made public: gear and tips that fix the problems we actually had, so you can spend your trip travelling instead of dealing with problems.
We buy it ourselves
Every candidate is ordered the way you would order it. No supplier samples dressed up as testing.
Born from: gear that promised everything and survived nothingIt comes travelling
Real trains, real rain, real seven-city mistakes. The gear rides in our bags before it ever appears here.
Born from: the bottle that leaked through the bagIt works, or it's gone
If it leaks, snaps, or just annoys us, it never reaches the shop. What you see is what survived.
Born from: a backpack full of things we never usedMore from the camera roll
The bits between the cities
Refuelling, Rome edition
Hydration, Italian edition
Station mirrors saw a lot of us
The speed run, as it actually looked
Still us, still travelling
Travel like us. Pack better than we did.
Everything here is something we wish we'd had on that trip, or something that's earned its place in our bags since. Plus the tips we collect along the way.