Day 20: Arriving at Our Tuscan Villa

We were awoken by the train man (I'm sure there's a technical term for his position, I'm just not aware of it). He alerted us that we were approaching our stop in Florence and returned our passports to us. We said our goodbyes to our compartment-mates and navigated our way through the train station. Luckily, Italian was way easier than French for us to figure out. Zach and I bought train tickets to Siena, where we caught a bus to San Gimignano.

I so wish that we would have been well-rested upon arriving at San Gimignano because I think we were just too tired to fully process and appreciate the reality and beauty of arriving in a Medieval walled city...in Italy. As it were, we kind of walked around in a daze, dodging excited tourists for awhile. We settled on gelato for lunch (an easy choice), then made our way outside of the city to locate our little villa, Le Volte

We still had a couple of hours before we were supposed to arrive at Le Volte, so we sat on this bench overlooking the Tuscan countryside and talked.

Every once in a while, one of the little Italian mini-trucks would zoom by, and we would just die laughing. Between truck sightings, we practiced some Italian phrases Zach had printed out before we left. After about an hour, we headed in the direction we thought our place might be.

Neither of us was really sure exactly how far away the villa was, but we figured we would enjoy nice scenery along the way. It turned out that the walk was about 25 minutes, which wasn't too bad except that at least 10 of it was alongside a highway with no shoulder. I'm sure we looked like idiots, but oh well.

Finally, we arrived at Le Volte, and boy was it worth it! My only hope was that it would be clean, and it far exceeded my expectations. We were greeted by the hostess with a bottle of wine and a bottle of water (both equally essential, if you ask me). While I got cleaned up (due to the heat on our train, I woke up with extremely pungent body odor), Zach headed to the grocery shop we had passed and bought groceries for us. To my delight, he cooked this wonderful dinner of fresh sausage, mozzarella spinach, pasta, and tomato sauce. It's hard to describe how wonderful this meal was, but after a month of fish and chips, well, this was heavenly. Excited to stay put for 7 days, we agreed to sleep as long as we could that night and just play it by ear in the morning.