From Flight Attendants to Full Time Travelers Exploring Vegan Life with Toshi & Gary

Link for the Show notes

Today, we have two incredibly inspiring guests joining us—Toshi and Gary from Skyways to Highways. Toshi and Gary are seasoned international flight attendants with over 30 years of experience in the airline industry. Together, they’ve taken an extraordinary step away from traditional lifestyles, choosing instead to embrace life on the road in their teardrop trailer.

In our conversation, Toshi and Gary share their journey from high-flying careers to an adventurous, nature-focused lifestyle on the highways. We talk about their unique travel approach, their love for vegan cuisine, and how they’re crafting delicious campfire meals as they explore the U.S. Whether it’s boondocking in the wilderness, foraging for ingredients, or balancing life on the road with content creation, Toshi and Gary offer insights into a lifestyle that’s all about freedom, exploration, and reconnecting with nature.

So, sit back, relax, and get ready to be inspired by Toshi and Gary’s story!

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Transcript

Brighde: Welcome Toshi. Welcome Gary to the World Vegan Travel Podcast. Thank you so  

Toshi: much for having us. We're excited to be here.  

Brighde: I am thrilled to have you on because I stumbled across your YouTube channel a few months ago now, when I was going down this rabbit hole of teardrop trailers. That's a weird thing to be going down a rabbit hole on but I was, and then I stumbled across your videos. 

And then once I realized that Toshi, you are vegan, and basically your life has just been like travel in many different ways. I knew I wanted to have you on the podcast because I think what you're doing is super inspiring, and I'm sure people will really appreciate it. So I know we're going to talk about your life and your travel life in depth, but if you wouldn't mind, each of you, giving our listeners just a little bit of a very brief overview. 

Toshi, would you mind starting?  

Toshi: Sure. Let's see, where do I begin? We've been flight attendants for a number of years, a pretty long time, and we met while flying. I was a brand new flight attendant. Gary had been flying for four years. He was a senior flight attendant. 

But yeah, we started flying together. We became very good friends. We ended up getting married five years later and moving here to New Hampshire. It's been quite a journey. But we enjoy flying our trips together. We're one of those weird couples that enjoys having our days off and our work time together. 

We get along really well. We started out as best friends. We're not one of those couples that argues and hates to be around each other. We really enjoy our time spent together traveling skyways, and now, of course the past four years. A little over four years, traveling on the road across America. 

Brighde: Fantastic. And Gary, would you mind sharing what inspired you to become a flight attendant in the first place way back then?  

Gary: Let's say, it's funny. To become a flight attendant, I was in school, and a bunch of people were going to an interview for an airline, and they talked me into going with them, and most of us got hired. It was just a mistake, and it just seemed like something that was very interesting to do. I just decided to go with it, and yeah, it's been quite a career for me. 

 It's been pretty interesting, and it's been great. I'm really glad that I didn't turn that opportunity down because otherwise I wouldn't have met her.  

Toshi: I am too.  

Brighde: I'm really impressed with how the airline that you still work for, I believe, or they allow you, they must schedule you on most of the same flights. 

All of the same flights. Like how does that work? I'm surprised at that. Toshi?  

Toshi: So it's actually a process called buddy bidding, and it is a way that we're able to bid our schedules purposely together so that we have our trips together and our days off together. Buddy bidding allows us to fly as much as we want together. 

So usually it's an entire month's schedule. Gary's technically my boss at work. He's a purser. So we bid the positions that we prefer. So he prefers to fly purser. And then as we bid for our trips, the seniority for both flight attendants goes to the most junior flight attendant, which would be me, being four years his junior, four years company senior seniority. 

So he comes down to my level, so to speak, and he only gets to hold what I can hold. What we say is, if someone is buddy bidding with you, and your junior, then it must be Love, because they're not getting the schedule that they would normally want to get, because he's not going to be flying the high time lucrative flights. 

He's going to be flying the lesser flights just to fly with me, yeah, it's love,  

I guess.  

Brighde: I see it. I see it through this webcam for sure. What does it normally look like in terms of your schedule? By the sounds of it, your schedule is released on a monthly basis. Do you work like seven days on, three days off, because of course, you also do incredible highway travel as well, and we'll talk about that in a minute. How is it set up in a way that allows you to explore the U. S. and your backyard? Because you need more than one or two days in a row in order to be able to  

Toshi: do  

Brighde: that. 

Oh, yes.  

Toshi: It is a situation to where we are able, because of our seniority, we have a number of years with the company. So we are pretty much free to choose our days off and choose our flight path, and not have to worry too much about whether we're going to hold certain days off. 

And it also gives us an opportunity to have a lot more time off than probably the average flight attendant with less seniority. It gives us plenty of time off. We can make our schedule what we want to make it. So if we want to fly to Brazil, then we fly to Brazil. 

And those trips are longer. So that gives us more time off at home. And then we bid our trips back to back. It's called back to back. So we're bidding, let's say two trips to Sao Paulo in a row. So then we're flying eight days in a row, and then we can finagle our way to have two weeks off after that, which is great. 

It gives us plenty of time to hit the road in between trips.  

Brighde: I see. And Gary, would you mind sharing the kind of destinations that you go to? Because Toshi alluded to this, you actually do long haul trips, correct?  

Gary: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So I do a lot of South America trips out of New York, and Argentina, Sao Paulo, Rio. 

Recently I've been flying a little bit of India to Delhi, and that's very long haul. That's like a 15 hour trip. 15 hours there and things like that. So I do a lot of those. I still enjoy flying to Europe, like Spain, and Paris, and things like that also.  

Brighde: Fantastic. Do you have anything to add to that, Toshi? 

Toshi: He enjoys, I think we both do. We pick the trips that we love based upon food. Our travel is food based, and he loves going to Argentina for steaks, that's the one time that he gets to go and have all of his red meat, and all of his steaks and everything. 

And he really enjoys his time there because he can just have a really great meal.  

 I'm not traveling anywhere for a steak, clearly. 

And it's not my favorite destination, simply because. There are very few vegans in Argentina. So finding vegetables at a restaurant is not very easy. It's not my favorite place to go.  

Gary: If I may interject, I think our favorite place to travel together is probably Sao Paolo, because Sao Paolo's got a very great vegan community there. 

They  

Toshi: do.  

Gary: And they just have great food. Yeah.  

Toshi: Yeah, Sao Paolo's pretty neat. I've found a number of places that I enjoy going for dinner. They have vegan flea markets, like vegan farmers markets. Vegan fairs. There's a place that you can go to, I think it's in Brigadeiro, and they have a fair once a month on a Sunday or a Saturday. 

And everything in this entire fair is vegan and it's fantastic. I have a friend, a couple friends there, that I go with and we just eat all of the vegan food, and I enjoy food from the destination veganized. I don't want to go to Brazil for guacamole, and chips, and salsa. I want to go to Brazil and have Brazilian cuisine that is veganized. 

So getting a chance to have the cultural food veganized, to me, is definitely key.  

Brighde: It's not always easy to find, is it? It's funny because like Paris, for example, it has tons of amazing vegan restaurants, but there are not that many that are veganizing French cuisine. 

Toshi: Very true.  

Brighde: I find it very frustrating. There's definitely some great restaurants. Same. But yeah. You can often really have to go out of your way to find the things that you're looking for, as you said. So up until 2020, I'm guessing, you were just working, and maybe in your time off, you would come to maybe the home from where you're speaking to me from today. 

But then something happened in 2020 that made you decide to switch things up. Can you talk us through that?  

Gary: Yeah. In 2020, we had an opportunity because of everything that was going on at that time. Our company gave us an opportunity to take almost 20 months off from work. 

Wow. Yes. And because of the different programs that there was being offered to the company, they gave us a stipend to be able to take the time off and things like that. And financially we were able to do so. And during that time, that's when we had the trailer built for us to start traveling. And we've always liked to do that. We'd always liked backpacking and traveling with backpacks through Europe and through Asia, and things like that. So we had the trailer built, and we'd never really seen the United States. 

 We discussed that, and that's when we started taking off in our trailer.  

Toshi: Yeah. It's been wonderful.  

Gary: Yeah.  

Toshi: That was a great opportunity. An opportunity of a lifetime that we had to take advantage of. They offered us, not full pay, obviously, but we had a stipend, and we had the opportunity to keep our benefits, our medical, our insurance, all of that. Yeah. So it's like, why on earth would we not take advantage of that. We had 20 months to play with on the road, and yeah, the YouTube channel was born out of our friends and family worrying that we weren't quarantining at home, ' What are you doing? 

You can't be out there in the wild.' So we started the channel just to let them know that we were safe and well, so they could see where we were. We just started posting videos, and they could see we were safe and enjoying ourselves. 

 Now, can you tell us a little bit about your teardrop trailer? 

Brighde: Maybe just define a teardrop trailer for those that don't know. And maybe, yeah, just describe what a teardrop trailer looks like, and like how you live in it. Gary, would you mind?  

Gary: No, not at all. A teardrop trailer, the one we purchased is more, how do I put it? It's more of an off-road trailer. We pull it behind our Jeep. 

It's designed to go pretty much anywhere our Jeep can go. So we can go off-road with it, and things like that. It's small. It's only five by nine. It's a bed inside, but she does have a great galley in the back that opens up, and she has plenty of room for everything she needs to cook with. 

 We have a great awning, so we have great outdoor space. And yeah, we just enjoy being the outdoors, and we have a space to sleep on. We don't have to sleep in a tent. That's pretty much it. We've been tenting and camping for a long time since we met and just not sleeping on the ground, 

it's a plus.  

Brighde: And Toshi, why did you decide to go small rather than to get like something more like a fifth wheel or an RV or something like that? What made you decide to go to the teardrop trailer? I went down a teardrop trailer rabbit hole. Like the kitchen, if it's not clear, is actually outside. So you kind of, like the trunk of a car, you lift it up, and then you have this kind of kitchen in front of you. So you're really cooking in the elements. You're cooking in the rain, although you probably have a little bit of protection from the rain by the trunk for want of a better word. 

Can you talk to that?  

You  

Toshi: know, I am not a fancy girl. I don't need bells and whistles. I enjoy backpack camping. I enjoyed our time spent. We were in Indonesia. We were in Thailand. We've been everywhere in Mexico, camping on the beaches. And for me, that's an adventure. 

That's fun. I Love, just, not taking a shower for five days. I'm okay with that. He's more of a princess. He needs a shower.  

Gary: Five days. I've done it. I've done it. He prefers that too.  

Toshi: So for me, I grew up camping as a kid. My parents were very much into that. 

And my dad was always just get dirty. Let the kids just go play and have a good time. And so for me, that's what camping is. So I wanted to still feel like I was camping and still feel like I'm out in the elements, in the wild, and not be so protected. I don't necessarily want a penthouse on wheels. 

I don't really need a fancy place, and the outdoor kitchen is actually challenging. So it's something different, coming from having worked in a professional kitchen, having had a wonderful kitchen at home. I enjoy the challenge of the elements, trying to cook. I'm not a fan of cooking in the dark so much, but I've cooked in the snow. While it's snowing on me, I'm sitting here trying to cook dinner, that's fun and exciting to me. 

Brighde: Wow. When you had this incredible 20 months off, did you take just one big trip or would you do a month, and then come back home and do your washing, and get cleaned up, and then go out again? Like, how did you do that, Gary?  

Gary: What happened was, at the beginning of this, we ordered our trailer. 

We had it built, and it took them nine months to build that. So we had a bunch of time to plan for taking off when we picked up our trailer. And during that time, we spent a lot of time just in the kitchen. Everyday at three o'clock in the afternoon we were home. 

It was nice to be at home and enjoy it. So we would start cooking every day at three o'clock in the afternoon.  

Toshi: And it was an event, every day. We even had every single day of the week tagged for a certain specific type of meal. Sundays was supper.  

So the evening would be a traditional dish that mom would make like meatloaf or mac and cheese or what have you. And then Mondays were ramen night and Tuesdays, tacos, of course, taco Tuesday. Wednesday, what was Wednesday? 

I don't know.  

Gary: There was always an Italian and Mediterranean night.  

Toshi: Fridays were always pizza. Yeah. And then Saturdays was like a Americano. Whatever we wanted to make there. This time off that we had, we literally just enjoyed; it was all centered around food. So farmers markets, and running through the grocery store to get the staples, and then three o'clock comes, there's a cocktail in hand. There's jazz on the stereo, any, you know, we have a vinyl player, of course. 

And then we just spend the entire day cooking and creating. It was fun. Having fun.  

Gary: It was a lot of fun.  

Toshi: Yeah, it was.  

Gary: I do miss that. We were  

Toshi: very fortunate to have the opportunity to do all of that.  

Brighde: And when you started traveling, were you going out for just a couple of weeks at a time, or did you go and just do one huge, massive, long trip once your trailer was finally ready? 

Toshi: The trailer was, during the whole thing, there was a supply chain issue, so it took the trailer longer to be built. They had a supply chain issue with steel and rubber, and the items that make up a trailer, they couldn't source at certain times. 

So the trailer took a little bit longer to build than we had anticipated. The idea was to be on the road for the full; technically we're supposed to be on the road for six months without coming home, just going from East Coast all the way to the West Coast. 

And then we were hoping to maybe dip down into Mexico at some point or up into Canada and Alaska. But it took a while for our trailer to be built. And then we were recalled early to come back to work. So we didn't get the full amount of time that we were presented. We had to come back a little early, so we were all the way out in Utah and had to speed back to get back home. 

Yeah, so it was definitely, but we got  

Gary: almost three months, three months solid on the road. Yeah,  

Toshi: three months straight without you returning home.  

Gary: Incredible. Yeah, it was amazing.  

Brighde: Wonderful. And something I'm wondering, what is a day in the life like for you when you are in your little teardrop trailer? 

What are the kinds of things that you're interested in doing? I think from your YouTube channel, you seem to like, like national parks. Are you always staying in campsites? I'm just curious, if you can give me a little bit of a window in what life is like when you are in the trailer, and when you're having a really great day? 

Toshi: We actually did the bucket list; national parts. There's a few more on the list, but we actually prefer what's called boondocking. And that's finding an area where there's no natural resources, or should I say, no man made resources. There's no electricity, there's no running water, there aren't any facilities for showers and bathrooms. We're just out in the woods all alone with nature and all the critters that, that entails. 

And we prefer being off grid, and that is just our wheelhouse. We enjoy hiking, and of course, I'm always foraging. I'm always digging. My nails are constantly full of dirt, because I'm always digging in the dirt, looking for mushrooms, medicinal herbs. 

I have definitely found a love there that I truly enjoy. Yeah. A lot of that's spent playing cards, me beating him at Gin Rummy, and hiking, and all of that. Yeah.  

Brighde: Fantastic. And Gary, something I'm curious about is, like how you divide things that need to be done, because there's always; from what I've heard watched on YouTube. 

There's always like tons of errands to do when you're living out of a vehicle, whether it's washing or constantly washing up because the sink is so small and things break. I've heard; on very often because you're moving on this kind of like bumpy surface, and things just break more easily. Like, how do you tag team all of this stuff when you are living in a small space. Maybe you're just so good at it because you've been doing it for so long. I can imagine you in the galley on the actual plane and having to work as such a team. Maybe it just easily translates to being in a teardrop trailer. Can you talk to any of that?  

Gary: Very much so. It does. Being on a plane working together, it just, it really does. It's a tag team. I don't cook. No. She does most of the cooking, and I'm happy that she does that because I'm fed very well. She does a great job. I do the cleanup. I am in charge of cleanup, and then, yeah, we both have our tasks at camp. I do the cleanup, she does the cooking, and we share all the other duties also. And it works out pretty well for everything. And there's days that when we're traveling, probably every two weeks, we try to find a campground that has laundry facilities and different things like that, that we can actually spend a day, maybe two, get all our laundry done, get everything cleaned up. 

And  

Toshi: It's reorganization.  

Gary: It's a reorganization day and a relaxing day.  

Toshi: Yeah.  

Gary: Relaxing for us to get things done. And then we're back on the road again. And we did decide the new destination we're heading for.  

Brighde: Yeah. That's another question that I have for you. Like, how do you plan for your travels? Because it can sometimes be hard to plan for future travel when you're actually traveling yourself. And I'm imagining that maybe you don't have access to great internet while you're doing all this. So what resources do you do? And do you have any tips or tricks on how to plan for travel while you're actually like busy traveling? 

Gary: That's funny because you're going to catch it. You're going to chime in on this too. But we don't. No. A lot of times we wake up in the morning and decide a destination. If we're going to, all right, we're going to head west. And then as we're driving west, then we decide where we're going. 

Toshi: We take the Anthony Bourdain stance on 'no reservations.' Yeah. So we don't make any reservations at any park, no matter how popular, like Yellowstone, it doesn't matter. We show up, we have one rule and it's called 'arrive by five.' Gary does all of the driving because that's what he enjoys doing. He hates my driving. But he does all of the driving, and then when he's done driving, wherever we want to be, at five o'clock, that's where we are. So we drive until about three o'clock and then I start finding a place for us to stay. Depending on how many nights we want to stay, and that's usually as remote as we can find. We try to avoid the KOAs, the RV parks. Anything putting us in a situation of listening to a generator all night or something like that. We're looking for the places that don't have playgrounds for kids, and swimming pools, and all of that stuff. We're looking for nice peaceful, quiet, lots of trees, and yeah. So we don't really plan so much.  

Gary: We  

Toshi: don't at all. Like we just decide.  

Gary: We just show up.  

Toshi: We show up. Do you have a spot for us? How many days do we want to stay? Do we like it? Okay, we'll probably stay two or three days. 

Gary: Yeah.  

If  

Toshi: we don't like it, we're overnight and we're moving on.  

Brighde: I can't imagine what that would be like. My partner Seb, he loves to plan and that's one of the reasons why we can run like luxury vegan tours because he is so good at planning. I will say sometimes, 'Can't we just go with the flow? Can't we just go with the flow, and just see what unfolds?' Exactly. Yeah that frustrates me from time to time, but at the same time, he is the one that's taking on this burden; slash, responsibility of doing the organization. So I try not to complain too much, but yeah, I would love to just take things a little bit more easily when traveling. So a question that I have now is, of course now you are back at work, and you are still producing YouTube videos from your teardrop trailer. So I imagine things are looking a little bit different in terms of when you could travel, and juggling all of that. Honestly, I don't know how you work and travel like this, and create content when you probably don't have internet access all of the time? I guess that's another question. But how is it looking like now in terms of balancing your full time travel, and then traveling in your time off?  

Toshi: We just  

Gary: returned from a two month trip. 

Toshi: Yeah, we were on the road for two months. We literally just got home yesterday. 

Thank you. Yeah, it was wonderful. So when we first spoke to you, we were on the road, and that was the beginning.  

Gary: And we  

Toshi: knew we were going to be taking this long, two month trip.  

Gary: We combine days off with vacation and everything. And we plan it out during the year, like probably in January, we'll start planning, not where we're going, how we're going to use our time off during the camping season. We can manipulate our schedule so well with our vacation times. We can get a substantial amount of time off. 

Toshi: Yes.  

Gary: And that's how we work it.  

Toshi: Yeah. And in the winter time, because we're not necessarily fair weather campers, we do enjoy a little cold weather camping. But it does get extremely cold here. Our channel is called Skyways to Highways for a reason. It enables us to film our layovers, all of the fun that we're having during the winter months, because we fly a lot during the winter so that we can have all of the time off in the summertime to be in our trailer and camp. Yeah, it's a nice balance. But from spring, let's say from May, all the way through November, we're camping. Then we try to take one winter camp, that'll be in January. Two. Maybe three. Oh, okay. There's news. You heard it here first. You're my witness. But yeah, so we try to have a nice balance, and spend as much time in the trailer as we can. And then when we're not camping, it's nice to be able to have the content of our layovers and show what we're doing in our day job life, I guess you could say. And I've started a whole new YouTube channel. Partly based upon my travels, as far as finding vegan food, going to different places, different destinations. And I also enjoy the idea of looking to see what that particular city has that everyone loves. What's the destination meal, that one meal that people go there for. And then usually that's a meal that I can't try. And it makes me frustrated. I want to try these meals and I can't. So I take them home, and veganize them, and make them accessible for everyone. So I'm looking forward to doing that. My first two episodes will be Madrid and Barcelona, and then the next one after that will be Rome. I'm taking food that you can't try on these layovers and veganizing them, and having a great time doing it.  

Brighde: Would you say that the two of you are more organized and productive than average people? Because right now, I cannot even afford to, I can't fathom managing all of this. I would love to say  

Toshi: that.  

Gary: However, we are probably the biggest procrastinators ever. Oh  

Toshi: man, we're terrible, bad procrastinators. We  

Gary: juggle it.  

Toshi: We do, but I can't say that we're very organized. I think a lot of people think we're organized. But if they see our trailer right now. If I could take you with us out outside and show you what our trailer looks like right now. 

Gary: We fake it very well.  

Toshi: We do.  

Brighde: We do.  

Gary: Yeah.  

Brighde: I love that. Something, a flaw of mine, I think, is that I'm just imagining myself in your situation. I'm jealous of the fact that you're able to just not worry about the state of your trailer. And honestly, it's not that important. There are other things that are more important. But for me, if I woke up and I saw that washing up needed to be done or some other errands that needed to be done, I can't not do them. It's a blessing and a curse. I sometimes wish I could just let go some of those things. So I honestly think that maybe because you don't worry so much about those things, it allows you the time to focus on, essentially, what's really important.  

Toshi: True. True. Also too, though, it does get us in a little bit of a bind. For instance, the other night I forgot a few things that I left out at camp, and we got a raccoon. We had a trash panda that literally scratched up our trailer and ate  

Gary: your cookie.  

Toshi: Yes, ate all kinds of stuff. Okay, that was my fault. I did leave that out. I didn't put it away. I forgot. So yeah we could use a little more organization at camp. But, it's a funny story, it's an adventure. So it is a funny story to tell in the end.  

Brighde: I love it. So Toshi and Gary, thank you so much for being on the World Vegan Travel Podcast. I am super motivated. I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell Seb, we have got to get an RV slash teardrop trailer. He's about 50 percent there, I think. Oh, that's good.  

Gary: You can come camping with us. Oh my goodness. 

I would love to learn from the  

Brighde: pros. And I know you do so many things. You've got so many projects. Two YouTube channels, all sorts of things. You've got lots of little business ventures in them that are coming up. Would you mind sharing with listeners all about that so they can keep on top of all of your things you've got going on? 

Toshi: Oh, gosh. There is a lot going on, I have to admit. I don't sleep a lot, and I have all kinds of ideas running through my head on a regular basis. I think the first thing is our spice blends line that we began, with all of that time off that we had initially when we started this journey. We just came up with this, where we felt there was a need to have just one particular spice blend to rule them all. Everybody has a pantry in their kitchen. You have a ton of different spices. You've got the garlic and the onion and this. And sometimes it's hard to figure out how much of everything that you're putting in, unless you're following a recipe. And we just found that it was so much easier to just have one particular spice blend that goes seamlessly with everything Italian, Asian, Mexican. We really just wanted to simplify the process at this point, and so we just started dabbling, and put together a few different blends that we just truly loved. And we started sharing it with friends, and they were like, 'Hey, wait a second. This is delicious. You should probably sell this.' And we're like, 'No, we're just making it for ourselves.' And then it snowballed into an actual business. Our first initial couple of sales, we make the batches fresh before we're selling them. We don't have a large stock. We don't have a big giant home or storage place. So we make them fresh and then we go sell them. We've made all of the money back that we initially invested. We've gotten some extremely good feedback. So we're having a great time with that. Also, the cookbook that we've been working on. That's another thing that we started.  

Gary: You've been working on the cookbook. I do all the tasting.  

Brighde: Very important  

Gary: job. It's got to be, it's got to be neat to approve. Yes, exactly. I'm a taster.  

Toshi: Definitely. And that was born, with him, me asking him ' What do you want to cook today? What do you feel like eating today?' And he'll give me his favorite meals. Then I will take those and get as close to the original dish as I possibly can, but vegan, because when we were quarantined, he literally was missing all of the meals that he normally enjoyed. Himself, and his labor, was like spaghetti carbonara. That's his favorite entree. Like his favorite dish. Only  

Gary: at certain destinations.  

Toshi: Only in  

Gary: Rome, I have spaghetti.  

Toshi: So when he wants fried chicken, I make fried chicken, but I just make it vegan. I  

Gary: don't miss fried chicken at all.  

Toshi: I do that with mushrooms, and it comes out surprisingly well. No one eats boiled chicken or plain chicken. Nobody eats just plain old chicken with nothing on it. Everybody, even Colonel Sanders says it's 11 herbs and spices. So if you season the food properly and handle it well, you know, it's going to be very similar to what you're used to. It's not the chicken that tastes good. It's how you season it. And my kryptonite is unseasoned food. If it's not seasoned properly, I'm not eating it. And I don't want anyone to have my food, and it's not seasoned properly.  

Brighde: What are the plans for the cookbook in terms of, when will it be released? Are you still working on it or is it just like a passion project?  

Toshi: It  

Brighde: is a  

Toshi: passion project. Yes.  

Gary: Yes, and yes. 

Toshi: So yes, definitely still working on it. Still plugging away. I am a little bit of a perfectionist, so I'm constantly tweaking. I'm a mad scientist, I guess you could say. So I'm constantly thinking I can make this better. And so it's almost never finished because I want to rework things. I take some time away from it, and then I want to revisit it, and say, I can tweak it in this manner and make it even better. There's got to be a point at some time here where I just say, 'Okay, it's finished.' And it's done. I'm hoping by the end of the year that I will start working on the beta testing. I have six people that have volunteered to take my recipes and literally just put them through the paces and give me feedback on whether it's a done recipe, and it came out perfect every time, or whether it needs more work, and then I'll go back to the drawing board. I certainly hope by this time next year that I have a finished product in hand that we can start working on. We actually have a few vendors who are eager to actually sell the cookbook. So hopefully, while they're still interested, we'll get this done. So I've got a lot of work to do this winter. I have to be home in order to create these. I can't do that while I'm flying. So I'll probably not fly a ton while I'm trying to get the finishing touches on these recipes and get them out there.  

Brighde: I love it. And Gary, do you have any plans for the YouTube channel because you're growing in subscribers which is amazing. Would it be a goal to quit the day job and work on that full time? Or is it just seeing how things go.  

Gary: No, this is a good question. Good question. It would be a big goal to quit the day job. I've been doing this for quite a while now. Yes, and no, because I think the only problem with that is because I have so much seniority now. I want to do and go wherever I want to go. But yes, I would love to, yeah, move on eventually. And probably fairly soon, let's hope. We're looking. They've got  

Brighde: you by the golden handcuffs right now, is that right? 

Yeah.  

Gary: Yeah, hoping to move on soon. And I would like to go a little bit more full time with the trailer because she would be allowed to fly wherever I might be, and I can pick her up anytime. That's a thought we've talked about. So that could be something in our future. Fairly soon, hopefully.  

Toshi: This is a really tough job to leave, especially when you get to a certain seniority to where your life is what you make it. You fly when you want to fly. You're off when you want to be off. You go where you want to go. It's really tough to give that up, and that's the trap of this job because it's just so easy to enjoy. There are flight attendants who have been flying longer than I've been alive.  

Gary: That's true. And they can't  

Toshi: quit because they're just having so much fun. When you're going to Venice and Amsterdam, when you're going to Paris for lunch. It is tough. I get it. 

Also too, there comes a time where you need to segue into a next phase of your other life, and I'm hoping that he does that. I think within the next three years, I'm thinking, he's going to segue, but he has to have a hobby. He's not allowed to sit on the couch and drink beer. 

Gary: I got a hobby, I take care of you.  

Toshi: Okay. 

Brighde: Fantastic. All right. You have so much going on. I love that you've just let yourself be open to how life unfolds. And it's working out for you both by seeing you on YouTube, and listening to what you've said here today. I think this is just super inspiring. How can people follow your YouTube channel? What do they need to search and subscribe to, to make sure they're getting all of the great info?  

Toshi: Our YouTube channel is Skyways to Highways. And we have an Instagram channel, which we need to work on, but Skyways to Highways on Instagram. We just launched a brand new website, fellow hiker trailer owner, she was incredible. Cody just put together this beautiful website for us. And we just launched that last weekend and, yeah. I looked at it before we got on the call. She did an amazing job. 

She did an amazing job. She's just phenomenal. And she's a fledgling, small business. We love supporting small businesses. And so this was really, a long time coming. We've been working on getting this done for quite a long time. So you can check out our recipes. You can purchase our road dust, and there's a blog on there, to where I'm going to be blogging about our travels, flight attendants. 

You can see some of our videos and yeah, that is skywaystohighways. com.  

Gary: And you also have the other channel you're just launching.  

Toshi: Yeah. So the new channel, which would be wonderful, wander with a full belly, WandeFull Vegan Eats, that will be the new channel that we're beginning. And I'm looking forward to doing that. 

I don't know how I'm going to find the time, but I'm going to get the time to start uploading some videos soon. But that's my little vegan baby right there, to where it's going to be focused on. Just cooking. Cooking. Foraging. Finding really great vegan restaurants in other countries, and also in the United States. One of my favorite vegan restaurants actually is in the United States in Brattleboro, Vermont.  

Gary: One of yours?  

Toshi: Okay, one of ours. It's actually one of his favorite restaurants.  

Gary: It's gotta be one of my favorites.  

Toshi: Yeah, Chef Nick, in Brattleboro, Vermont, it's called Vegan AF. 

It is one of the most phenomenal restaurants, and 'AF' as an awesome food, because the food is amazing. It is. So yeah, we'll be reviewing that restaurant of course, and interviewing Chef Nick there at Vegan AF in Brattleboro, and hopefully other restaurants as well, other chefs. 

And yeah, I'm looking forward to doing that. Farmer's markets, of course. My love going to farmer's markets, and talking to farmers because they're my superheroes. So that channel will be all encompassing of all of that, but food centric, of course, and I'm looking forward to that.  

Brighde: I love it. Thank you so much for joining me on the World Vegan Travel Podcast. I hope our paths cross in future. That would be totally awesome. Thank you.