Poggibonsi – day 19

20 Jun

We headed out of Siena on a downhill run which is always a great start to give the legs a chance to wake up and to make you feel like progress is being made. We were well caloried and caffeinated from our quite decent hotel in Siena (despite the aforementioned restaurant issue). Just another seriously beautiful day weather wise, expecting mid 30s again.
After the initial downhill we climbed to Castellina in Chianti where Rob announced their third flat tire of the trip. Just as we were smugly thinking that’s 3 to zero in our favour, our front tire went pffft. No problem, except we were running out of spare tubes and CO2 cartridges so a bike shop became a priority. Nothing in Castellina in Chianti though, but people told us there were shops in Poggibonsi. We met several tourists that were Brits today, some cycling on organized tours and some regular tourists. The tandems always attract the curious.
Then began the second best, or perhaps the best 15km of cycling road in Italy as we headed downhill for Poggibonsi. Just the right downhill grade, a good road surface, light traffic and spectacular hill top scenery make it so. Tara took another video but I haven’t had luck with uploading those to the blog yet.
Poggibonsi was just a stopover for us with nothing particularly attracting to us, but a couple of things made it interesting. One was this night was the “white night” festival which promised (and delivered) music and crowds in the street until 2am. The second was a restaurant we found on tripadvisor. We showed up at 7:35 to an empty restaurant where they weren’t initially sure they could fit us in without a reservation(!) After deciding we could be seated a lovely maitre’d lady came and explained our food choices for the different courses for the evening. We never saw a menu. We just ate what was brought to us, including her wine recommendation. We had a view of the kitchen and the head chef and crew so we could see how the restaurant worked as the place completely filled up. These people were extremely competent in every way and we somewhat paid for it too, but left very satisfied with the experience.
The white night experience was fun because there was so much life in the streets but I can’t say we enjoyed the pounding electronnica beat at 2 in the morning when we had long before gone to bed.