Siena

I'm sitting here eating a breakfast of Nutella straight from the jar. We ran out of bread again amazingly fast. I can't seem to adjust to having Scott around for three meals a day. But that's no complaint!

We went to Siena yesterday, where our luck freestyling our way around Italy finally ran out. We arrived there mid-morning, on market day, without a decent map. Three strikes.

After a two hour drive, it took us an hour to find parking. Sixty painful minutes of winding and weaving through medieval streets hunting down parking garages that turned out to be full already. And thirty-six hundred excruciating seconds of listening to Owen bark that he was tired of sitting.

I included the picture above so you could see how the black and white striped duomo of Siena calls out from the terra cotta city like a beacon. This was essentially the kind of view we had of the city from our hard sought parking space. But we were so exhausted from the effort it took to park that we failed to even notice the view through the windshield.

We got out of the car and walked the opposite way.

And spent the next 45 minutes lost.

It made for a good laugh later when we got in our little Fiat to leave and saw the duomo framed like a picture before us.

Siena is a lot more congested and expensive than it was when we visited 9 years ago, but it's still beautiful. And we were actually glad when an afternoon rain storm cleared out the piazza for us.





Lessons learned: Arrive in Siena early. Never on a Wednesday. And for Pete's sake look up.