Day 2 - Colle Val d'Elsa to Monteriggioni

Coffees: 1, Gelati: 1, Wine: 1 glass
Actual Distance Walked: 18.8km, Actual Time Taken: 6h 9m
Planned Distance: 18.4km, Planned Time: 6h

Breakfast was amusing - to me at least.  There are two rooms for breakfast, a large and a small.  The large had two families with a small, ravening horde of children ranging in age from about 8 to one in a high chair.  The small breakfast room had everybody else crammed into it.  The parents in the main room did not look amused.

I successfully got out of Colle without meeting up with the couple from yesterday.  In fact, the only people I saw were several packs of MAMILs on mountain bikes.  I also encountered more than a few dogs.  The nicest (loosely speaking) would follow you along silently, just making the odd threatening growl if you looked like you might stop or otherwise invade their territory.  The majority were behind fences and would hurl themselves at the fence, barking and growling and making it perfectly plain they would like nothing more than to tear your throat out, if only this pesky fence wasn't in the way.

The extra 0.4km is due to me having to make a detour to avoid one particularly obnoxious dog.  It was one of those little yappy things that are smaller than most cats.  Since there was little damage it could actually do its owners didn't bother with fences or tying it up.  There was no way it was going to let me walk past "its" property so I had to cut across a farmer's field.  I expect he wasn't too impressed with me but he would have been even less impressed if I had skewered his mutt with my walking pole and I would definitely have been unimpressed at having the stupid thing attempt to nibble my ankles.

The route passed along the site of an old Roman bath.  The roof was gone and the walls were only waist high.  If there had been mosaics on the floor they were long gone.  Still, you could see the basic structure of the baths still with the main tepidarium pool and the several smaller pools off to the side.  Best of all, it still held water.  The main pool also contained a large collection of tadpoles and the odd goldfish, while the side pools just held slime.  The were several people in bathing suits standing around looking questioningly at the water.  I cheerfully pulled my boots off and cooled my feet.

Got to a tiny village called Strove around lunchtime.  There is a restaurant and a COOP food shop there. I ate at the restaurant years ago and had one of the best meals of my life there.  It wasn't open for lunch today, which is probably for the best.  This way I didn't run the risk of having my memories tarnished.  I ended up having a sandwich and the Italian equivalent of a cornetto from the COOP (not included in the gelati count as it doesn't count).  The only thing I can say about lunch is that it was worthy of being sold at a railway station.

Finally got to Monteriggioni, which is a tiny walled city at the top of a hill - of course.  It had been around 30C all day and not a cloud in the sky.  The picture below at a point about 4km away on the plain below the city.  I don't want to imagine what I looked like when I got to the hotel - an elegant 4 star place.  They quickly whisked me up to my room and out of sight.  The only drawback with the place was no Internet access, hence this delayed post.

Had a disappointing dinner to finish off a slightly disappointing day.  The food wasn't bad, just not as tasty as I have come to expect.  I started off with a eggplant and parmesan timbale, which managed to be bland.  This was followed by pici (spaghetti-like pasta) with ricotta, spinach and fresh tomato sauce which had all the flavour the first course lacked.  Main was roast pork ribs with roasted potatoes.  All I can say about this was it would have been better with some gooey, American barbecue-style sauce.  Dessert was creme brulee with hazelnuts.  If I'd made it I would have made the custard richer and perhaps added a dash of hazelnut liqueur to it.  I would definitely not have just put plain hazelnut pieces on top, but instead would have tossed them in sugar so they candied too.  Not bad, just could have been better.

And so to bed.