Travels With Jim and Rita

Episode 59: Season End, Slow Travel Sneak Peek

Jim Santos, travel writer and host of the International Living Podcast Season 2 Episode 59

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A medical detour changed our itinerary, but it sharpened our belief in slow travel and why roaming creates better stories than any checklist. We close out season two by sharing a vivid sneak peek of our upcoming book on how to plan, budget, and savor longer stays without tour buses dictating your day. From an apartment steps from the Arno in Florence to a trust-the-chef feast in a tucked-away Venetian trattoria, we relive the small choices that turned into big memories—and the practical systems that made them affordable.

We walk through the core pillars of slow travel: choosing one meaningful focus per day, renting apartments with kitchens to cut costs and live like a local, and using trains and ferries to keep plans flexible. You’ll hear how a wrong turn near Livorno became a Mediterranean moment, why a spontaneous side trip to Lucca beat a packed itinerary, and how rain in Rome turned into a playful, poncho-clad wander across cathedrals, fountains, and welcoming neighborhood bars. We also tackle safety myths with grounded advice, from reading a city’s rhythm to staying present and letting common sense do more work than a lanyard ever could.

We’re taking a short break to finish the book and regroup for future travels, and we’d love your questions and stories as we write. Subscribe, share with a friend who wants more from their trips, and leave a review to help fellow travelers find the show.

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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Travel to the Gym and Rita. I'm your host, Jim Statos, along with my wife Rita, and welcome to the second season of our podcast. In the first season, we set in motion our crazy plan to outbox the real estate market in the US and actually increased our retirement net day by selling our home and car and spending the next three years or so living abroad and exploring the world. Now that plan is in disarray, as I developed pancreatis in Latvia, necessitating a return to the US for further treatment and surgery. Join us now as we adjust our goals and try to salvage our travel plan. Hello everybody and welcome back to our podcast, Travels with Jim and Rita. This is a special episode as it marks the end of season two as we take a little hiatus from international travel. Now, two reasons for this. First we want to spend the holiday season with friends and family here in the U.S., though there will still be some local travel and some hosting going on. Now we're not sure if we'll take off in January for warmer climbs in South America or the Caribbean, or just spend a relaxing winter planning a big spring outing back to Europe. A lot will depend on the strength of the US dollar and where we can find the best deal on flights. Now the second reason is a little more exciting, at least for me. I want to take a break from podcasting to finish up a book I've started about slow travel and roaming. Now in this book I'll give you some background on our decisions to roam and talk frankly about our failures as well as our successes. We've had many questions from listeners and people we've met at international living conferences about some of the details of planning to roam. So I'll also cover some topics like the different types of roaming and slow travel, how to pick what works best for you, setting up spreadsheets to figure out the budget you can afford, making arrangements before you travel, what apps to get on your phone, finding accommodations abroad, and packing strategies. So in short, I hope to cover everything you need to know to start having your own adventures abroad. I'll also be providing several real life examples of people we have met using all sorts of strategies to see the world. So I thought today to close out our season and the last podcast of 2025, I'd give you a sneak peek of the book I hope to launch in time for your Christmas wish list, or at least next year's Hot Valentine Gift. So phone the neighbors, wake the kids, because here's an excerpt from the first chapter describing our first experience with roaming. Chapter is entitled, Did we invent slow travel? Now slow travel has become very popular in recent years. The basic idea is to eschew the typical one or two week vacation, rocketing from site to site, and instead spend longer periods of time in fewer locations. This is sometimes called being an untourist, not because you don't visit any tourist sites, but because they're not the focus of your experience. Rather than spending most of your time queuing up for a tour, you try to slow down and experience the country like a local. Walk the streets, shop the local markets, sample the restaurants for the locals are eating, and try to make a connection with your surroundings. One day while looking over Airbnbs in Tallinn, Estonia, and checking into ferries from there to Helsinki, Finland, it occurred to me that we may actually have discovered the slow travel lifestyle before we had even heard the term. Now here's how that happened. Italy is a destination on many a bucket list, and is easy to understand why. You have the majestic Alps in the north, the beautiful and historic Umbria and Cambria regions in the central part of the famous boot, and the sunny southern beaches plus the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Now with cities that practically ooze history like Florence, Rome, and Venice, just to name three, Italy is a historic and cultural epicenter with a history going back over eight hundred thousand years. The original seat of the Roman Empire, the center of the Catholic Church, and the birthplace of the Renaissance are all part of Italy's profound influence on Western culture. It's also the destination that marked our first slow travel experience. It took place just over fourteen years ago before we even knew what slow travel or roaming meant. I guess we were trailblazers in a very untouristy way. You see, the trip came about only because Rita's brother mentioned that he and his wife were thinking of signing up with a tour group to see Italy and asked if we wanted to go with them. It was one of those visit twelve cities in ten days packages. And when they told us it was going to cost about ten thousand dollars per couple, we did some research and decided we could put together a trip ourselves that would allow us to explore three different areas over three weeks and cost less than their two week package. While we wouldn't see as many cities, we could spend more time enjoying what we did see. Now this was before the days of Airbnb, but we were still able to use Craigslist to find accommodations. We rented a two bedroom apartment, complete with a kitchen and laundry in Florence, just a block from the river Arno and three blocks more to the famous Ponte Vecchio. The cost to us for a ten day stay was twelve hundred dollars, or six hundred dollars a couple. Now it was in a beautiful old building and I got a kick out of the old fashioned cage elevator. You had to open and close the door manually, then move a lever to select your floor. It made a creaky trip upward and came to a jerky stop in the general vicinity of the selected destination. It usually stopped a few inches short, but when we all stepped out it would spring up to floor level. It was a wonderful experience, living in the neighborhood instead of in a hotel. We'd stroll out to the cafe on the corner in the morning for some delicious coffee and maybe a pastry, and then had the whole day to explore the many beautiful places that were within walking distance of our little home. We made it a point to never try to do too much each day. We'd plan only one major goal, for instance, let's tour the Bobley Gardens today, and then just see where the rest of the day takes us. We may find a place that looks like a good spot for lunch, or we may go out for a walk in the evening and pick a random restaurant for dinner. With a deli, butcher shop, bakery, wine shop, and a small grocery store all in the same or adjacent block, we were also able to spend less by having some of our meals at home. We also tried something else that would become a staple of our slow travel experiences more than a decade later, the side trip. In fact, we took two. We had arranged to rent a car for the day and set out early one morning to make the short drive to the admittedly touristy destination of Pisa. We wanted to see the famous tower, of course, but also the amazing architecture of the buildings on the Plaza de Duomo. And what a car it was, an Alfa Romeo sedan with a six speed manual transmission that I absolutely loved driving. We did get slightly lost along the way and ended up just outside of Livorno on the coast, but it gave us a glimpse of the Mediterranean Sea and really having time to get a little lost as part of the fun of slow travel. We didn't just tour the site, and I'm happy to say that none of us posed for those holding up the tower shots. Instead we took the time to explore the city itself, finding a terrific local restaurant near the university where we were the only non locals enjoying a delicious lunch at a price much lower than what we would have had to spend in the restaurants by the plaza. On the way back to Florence, we had time to stop and see the historic walled city of Luca and enjoy some wine in the central square. The main point is our day was on our schedule, there was no tour group to meet or time tickets that we had to worry about. Now our second side trip was a little more ambitious. We packed small overnight bags and took a short walk early one morning to the Florence train station for a quick trip to Venice. The trains in Italy, indeed we found this true in most of Europe, are fast, reliable, comfortable, and affordable. We had plenty of time to take a nice water taxi trip and find a pleasant lunch spot before checking into our hotel. Then a relaxed day of self-guided exploration that culminated in dinner at an out of the way family owned restaurant. Again, we were the only tourists in the establishment, as half the tables were taken up with a birthday party being held for a local three year old girl. This impromptu stop turned into one of our fondest memories, which is exactly what slow travel is all about. It started when we asked for the menu. Our waiter, who we later found out was the owner, asked us, do you trust me? Peche or carne? A little confused, we told him meat would be fine, and he told us once again to trust him and went back into the kitchen without taking our order. He returned rather predictably with a bottle of wine, which he opened and served at the table. For the next three and a half hours, he continued to bring out course after course of delicious food, served family style, a large serving platter in the center of the table for us to help ourselves to whatever we wanted. Of course, the wine continued to flow, followed by grappa and then lemoncello to help digestion. Towards the end of the meal, we asked our waiter about the party, since all of the adults were singing boisterously at this point. He'd informed us of the birthday girl, and I told him that coincidentally, Rita and I had been together for three years. Now he had to bring his wife, the cook, out of the kitchen and introduce her and tell us how long they'd been together. He then shouted over to the party group about our three year anniversary, which led to cheers, more singing, and the group sending over to our table some glasses of champagne and pieces of birthday cake. It was quite a wobbly trip back to our hotel, especially with the confusing layout of Venice. We're probably lucky we didn't fall into a canal. Now from Florence, we then took a train to Naples, where we met a driver to take us to our next home away from home, a two-bedroom apartment in Positano. It was a beautiful place right on the beach with a breathtaking view of the harbor and surrounding hillsides. A small plaque on the wall informed us that Ernest Hemingway had spent a few months in our rooms. Once more we were in the heart of a community and quickly found a friend in the local grocer when we interrupted our first shopping trip to help his kids with their math homework. He and his wife were so pleased they led us around the store suggesting what we should try and what would go well with the shrimp we were planning to buy at the local fish market. When we finished shopping, the proprietor accidentally gave me too much change. Yes, suddenly I understood why we had to help with the kids' math homework. And when I handed him ten euro back and explained, he insisted that we let him carry our groceries back to our apartment. Now there were side trips there as well, a ferry down the coast to Amalfi, another ferry trip to Capri, and a driver who took us to Pompeii and waited to drive us back. Now none of these trips were arranged in advance, they were the what do you want to do today variety. Most of the trips were booked with the help of a gentleman we met at a kiosk on the beach, who seemed to have a cousin who could do whatever we liked. I have a cousin who can do your laundry. I have a cousin with a boat who can take you to Capri. My cousin can drive you to Pompeii and bring you back, and so on. Actually the cousin who drove us to Pompeii made it quite an adventure. The roads on the Amafi coast are famous for three things. They have very sharp turns, are rather narrow, and run along seaside cliffs with drops of a hundred feet or more. Whenever our sister-in-law, who was sitting in the back seat, would ask a question, our driver Antonio would turn around to talk to her, you know, so as not to be rude. After a few white knuckled turns and some angry honks from passing motorists, our brother-in-law nudged her and told her to please stop asking questions. After the Amalfi Coast it was another train back to Rome, where this time we spent a few days in a hotel, but one selected because it was both walking distance from the station where we detrained and central to the sites we wanted to visit. Again we took the slow travel approach by not cramming too much into one day and exploring the Colosseum, some of the cathedrals, and museums on our own, without a tour group and at our own pace. The only tour we took was one of the Vatican and Sistine Chapel. On one of our days we split up, the other couple choosing a hop on hop off toward the city, while Rita and I explored on foot. We wandered where we wanted, finding the Spanish steppes, Trevi Fountain, Parthenon, and a few other places. We didn't mind how far or in what direction we roamed, no pun intended, because we knew we could always hail a cab to get back to the hotel when we got tired. Although this was a day with off and on rain, since we had no schedule to ruin, we leaned into it instead. Several shops were selling cheap plastic ponchos, so we picked up a pair and kept wandering. Whenever the rain started we duck into the nearest establishment for a drink and or a snack, and in one of those shops we made friends with the bartenders, who thought just ordering rum and cokes was a marvelous idea. In fact, they brought us each out a six inch tumbler filled with rum and a can of coke, along with a big bowl of peanuts. The place was empty except for me and Rita, and we joined in as they were trying to teach a new Vietnamese employee swear words in as many languages as they could. As we took a cab back to our hotel for our last meal in Italy, I realized that our unscripted tour of Rome had been hugely successful in spite of, or possibly because of, the weather being less than optimal. It didn't matter to us because we had no real schedule other than getting back to the hotel for dinner, and we had plenty of time to relax and enjoy our last night in Rome. Now another topic I need to bring up, and indeed we'll return to from time to time, is safety. I've had a lot of people since tell me that they book tours mostly because of concerns for their safety in a foreign land, their safety in numbers after all. We were all over Florence, Venice, Luco, Rome, Positano, Amalfi, and Pompeii, and never had a bit of trouble or concerns about our safety. In Rome the street vendors were a little annoying, and at the Coliseum several guides had to be shooed off, but we never felt uncomfortable out on our own or like we were in danger. Except for once. Our very last morning in Rome, we met a driver we had hired to take us to the airport for the trip home. He helped load all our luggage, we jumped in and we were off. After a few moments, we noticed we seemed to be weaving in and out of the city streets, not heading for the highway at all. Also, our driver kept making short phone calls on his cell phone. About fifteen minutes of what was supposed to be a twenty minute ride, we were still on back streets and we were becoming a little concerned. Especially when he finished a call abruptly, then turned down a gravel road heading right toward a fenced in field. We were sure we were about to be robbed, stripped naked, and left in a gravel pit, when suddenly he made a sharp left, went up a ramp, and popped onto the expressway right in front of a sign that read Aeroporto five kilometers. Now perhaps one event while we were in Venice brought everything into focus for us and our style of travel. It happened right after we had completed a self guided tour of the Doge's palace. Rita and I were standing in line by the exit from the palace, waiting for our turn at the public restrooms. A gentleman carrying a red flag with a cruise ship logo on it walked up to a woman in front of us and told her we have to go. But I'm waiting to use the bathroom, she explained. I'm sorry, but the bus is ready to leave and we have to go back to the ship now. We watched as he half dragged the still protesting tourist out of line and away to what must have been a tense and possibly damp bus ride. Rita and I looked at each other shaking our heads in sympathy, and I think looking back, it was at that moment we discovered the advantages and joys of slow travel. We decided we would never find ourselves that pressed for time or that vulnerable to someone else's timetable. We've thoroughly embraced roaming, and our experiences abroad have been so much more enriching because of it. That's all for now. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that excerpt, and I promise to work diligently on the new book. Of course, we'll let you know when it's published and resume our travels and podcast in 2026. Remember that photos and videos of some of our travels can be found on our Instagram and YouTube sites, and more photos and blogs are on the website gymsantosbooks.com. You can also find all my books and audiobooks on Amazon at gymsantos.net, and all of those links are of course in the show notes. We hope you have a safe and happy holiday season, and if you have any questions or would like to be a guest on a future podcast to talk about your own travel experiences, just email me at gym at gymsantosbooks.com. So until next time, remember that we travel not to escape life, but so that life does not escape us.

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