After traveling full time for 7+ years, you might be asking yourself why we just decided to start our own travel podcast? Great question! I think a key moment for us was after getting back from spending 3 months in Europe in 2023 we found that many of our friends were also going on a trip to Europe, but often only for a week or two. They started asking us about travel tips and we were happy to help out.  

What really stood out was the advice we gave to our good friends Christina and Tony. They were heading to Tuscany, which we had just spent a month exploring, so we gave them some awesome, off-the-beaten path gems we had found. After they returned from their trip, we had dinner with them and asked them what their favorite thing was that they had done on their trip, and without even pausing, they both said, the wine tasting and 5 course meal at Cantinale in Monteriggioni you told us about!  

Boom…Travel Podcast Born…

But really though, what stood out to me so much was that this wine tasting wasn’t something I had researched and found, it wasn’t even planned into that day, it almost didn’t happen, and well…I downright made a mistake..it was an awesome mistake, but completely not meant or expected.  

Yet, this experience was not only theirs, but also their friend’s FAVORITE experience on their whole trip! This experience couldn’t be found by most travelers, the only reason we found it is that we are explorers at heart, and we make mistakes while we explore and sometimes it’s these mistakes that unlock experiences that are truly magical.

So tell us more about this 5 course meal!  

So we were staying in rural Tuscany and I found a castle near us I wanted to check out. So we headed out to Monteriggioni and got to walk through a lovely walled-in town. We, of course, stopped at the first cafe we found in the castle and got a morning tea and pastry, we bought some awesome Tuscan leather gifts for friends and then got a bit hungry. The restaurant in the castle wasn’t open yet, but I found a small family-run winery close by and it looked like they had a wine tasting and charcuterie boards for €15 (Euro). 

So we headed down the hill and found a winery at the bottom of the hill with a great view of the castle we had just walked through (we found out from talking to the owner that they were the only winery allowed to grow on that hill because it had been in her family for hundreds of years!) 

When we first walked in, we were actually told we could not do a wine tasting because we had to take the tour and a tour had already started (it’s very common in Tuscany that you have to take a tour with the wine tasting). So we said “shoot, well derci!” (we loved the slang for ‘goodbye’ we heard in rural Tuscany!) and headed back to our car. As we were about to drive away, the man we talked to at the winery came running out waving his hands frantically. 

I rolled down the window and said, “Si?” 

He said “I talked to the owner and we can get you on the tour that’s happening right now!”  

“Well cool, Grazie! Grazie mille!”

So we joined the current tour in the cellar, finished up, and they brought us up to the tasting room and asked us “Do you want the tasting or the food/wine experience?” 

We said “Food and wine please!” Because obviously we didn’t want just a wine tasting, we were hungry and we wanted to be able to order food and order wine. 

We were so excited for the charcuterie boards since we were a bit hungry at this point, so they sat us down on a lovely balcony surrounded by so much greenery and foliage around us. They poured our first glass of wine soon after we received our first course..  

It was at this time I was like…Did I make a mistake?? So I pulled up their website, tried translating it and read through their wine tastings. I turned to Kim, “um…I think I may have ordered the wrong thing!”  She immediately gets nervous (don’t get between Kim and her food!). 

Kim: “What did you order??!”  

Isaac: “Um… I think I may have ordered both of us a 5 course meal with our wine tasting!”

“What!!?” says Kim, “Should we call them over and tell them it was a miscommunication?”

Then the 2nd course arrived. 

I said “Na, lets see how this plays out haha.”

So we ended up having a fantastic 5 course meal paired with 6 cups of wine. 

The Best Hidden 5 Course Meal in Tuscany!

These are the mouth-watering meals we had:

Course 1: 4 types of bread. One looked like a slice of a baguette, one looked like homemade pringles!, another looked like skinny, crunchy breadsticks, and the last type of bread looked kind of like pumpernickel but a much darker brown, almost the color of chocolate

Course 2: cured meats, cheeses (not for me), and olive oil grilled bruschetta bread. The cured meats included super delicious sliced salami and thinly sliced prosciutto. 

Course 3: Kim’s favorite meal! She zoned out so hard, totally immersing herself in the delicious flavor of this meal, that when it came, it’s the only meal she didn’t take a picture of haha! A classic cacio e pepe dish. Since I can’t do cheese, Kim describes this dish as: “The black pepper was so perfectly sharp with a little zing, the sauce was so delicious & perfectly balanced covering each noodle. And it was beautifully presented with a parmesan cheese crisp to top it all off! *Kim drooling thinking about the pasta*

Course 4: 4 thinly sliced Tuscan-style steak slivers that were cooked beautifully medium rare, tender to the bite, melt-in-your mouth, juicy steak. It was paired with small hand-cut square potatoes that were bright yellow, almost like a Yukon Gold potato, but so soft on the inside, and lightly toasted on the outside. 

Course 5: Dessert! Cheesecake (for Kim) with a very artistic blueberry splatter, peach slices, and graham cracker crumbs. The cheesecake was also topped with graham cracker crumbs and 1 blueberry. This paired nicely with the dessert wine they provided. 

It was honestly an amazing and completely unexpected experience.  

Then the bill came… €50 Euro a person… For a 5 course meal and 6 cups of wine each! WOW! This would have cost $200-$500 in the USA and we sure wouldn’t have been served amazing, mouth-watering Italian pasta and Tuscan Steak! After we finished up we went inside to say thank you and the owner came out and said, “let me give you the rest of the tour that you missed!” So we went back to the vineyard with her outside and she showed us the amazing view and explained that because this land had been in her family for so long, she had the only vineyard allowed on the hill that the castle sits on.  

So the travel podcast?! After Tony told us that it was not only their favorite experience on their trip but it was also their friends, (who have travelled through Tuscany quite a lot), it hit me: Tony and Christina had about a 0% chance of finding this experience on their own. Kim and I don’t vacation, and we are rarely tourists, we are adventurers, explorers, we find things that few others know about, we drive down roads that have no online data. I will open up a map and say, ‘let’s head over to this area today and see what we find!’ So we realized we had to share our travel stories, share our travel advice, share our travel planning hacks and the inspiring stories we experience along the journey!

Real Practical Travel Advice

So it was time to launch our bi-weekly travel podcast! We started connecting with other fellow travel addicts and sharing their travel hacking methods and travel tips. There are so many digital nomads living abroad, and they all found a different path in order to create this travel lifestyle, so we wanted to share their stories and knowledge.

And we’re a bit weird, so it couldn’t be a boring, ‘we are just going to talk about what to do’ type of travel podcast. No, it had to be different, comedic, unexpected, and entirely authentically us. So we launched the Full Time to Travel Time Comedic Travel Podcast! 

What’s so cool about sharing our knowledge through our podcast is not only did this trip allow Tony and Christina to have the best experience on their 2 week Tuscany Trip, but their friends loved it so much they ended up buying 30 bottles of wine from the winery we recommended! So because we shared, we helped a family-run business make several thousand more dollars and it created life long memories! 

So come join us on a new type of Travel Podcast. One where you will laugh, learn hidden secrets, and learn how to create a lifestyle that allows you to travel whenever you want, wherever you want.  

Get Your Travel Inspiration

After traveling full time for 7+ years we have a lot to share! The podcast starts out highlighting the incredible United States National Park system.  Kim and I have traveled to 40 of the 63 National Parks so far and it’s our top mission right now to visit all 63! We will have an Episode for each National Park, and you can already listen to the Grand Canyon, Zion, Capitol Reef and Rocky Mountain Episodes! 

Listen to our most popular HIT episode: Episode 6: Travel Europe Like a Pro: Insider Tips for Americans to Travel Smart, which has quickly become our most listened to Episode! 

As our podcast grows we have had the opportunity to interview some amazing guests! Individuals who have been able to create a lifestyle of travel through a wide range of methods. While Kim and I decided to create a business, systemize it and staff it to allow us to travel, we have found people from all over the world have created their own pathways to travel. So we interview them for you so we can inspire others and help open up pathways for you to find your method to allow you to travel and explore this incredible world! 

So if you are craving an adventure, an incredible 5 course meal in Italy, or just to see amazing wildlife running through the fields, tune in to Full Time to Travel Time to unlock the skills and knowledge that will allow you to create memories that will last a lifetime!