Under The Tuscan Sun

We slept late to recover from our Cinque Terra trip and our numerous km walked over the last couple days. The first order of business was to pick up our rental car and head out into the country. Danielle is scared stiff at the thought of driving with the crazy Italians and Darren is like a kid in a candy store unsupervised! Of course the car is a standard and basically a glorified shopping cart with an engine, but Darren seems to enjoy shifting through the gears and moving in and out of the pedestrian, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle and auto traffic among their many traffic circles (just to ensure that you do not know what direction you are heading anymore!). The drive to Siena was beautiful as the sun was out and everything is green along these mountain roads including the crops, which the barley is beginning to head out. Upon arrival in Siena we were slowed by some sort of marching band and we soon discovered that most of this sleepy 60,000 person city is closed for Sunday. We locate a restaurant nearby, but it is incredibly busy and resultede in about a 40 minute weight until receiving our starters... Anyways we ended up being late to our check in at Castello di Grotti, but this did not cause any issues so we settled into our country estate and called it a day after visiting the nearby village for supper. The following day we ventured back into Siena, but did not do any sight seeing as we needed a church/museum free day! We headed north into the Chianti wine region and we mostly drove through this very hilly region, but did purchase some wine after much better tasting than Cinque Terra! We put about 300km on the rental during the day mostly just driving from sleepy little village to sleepy little village. We returned to our farmhouse and met another one of our hosts who recommended that we go to a nearby village for supper and that on our way to Florence we go to Castello di Brolio, which is where the Chianti blend was developed. We did both and had a fantastic dinner in Radi (about 10 inhabitants!) and the trip to Castello di Brolio went well and we learned that we can buy several of their wines in Canada, so we purchased the Super Tuscan as we are not able to purchase it in Canada and it was our favourite. The drive into Florence was interesting... We missed one turn, which resulted in us being lost for about 10 – 15 minutes which you can imagine what this did for Danielle`s composure... We shortly found our rental car place and dropped of our car to go grab our train to Rome. We made it to Rome safely.