We Made It

I write this from our agritourismo in Volterra, ready to crash from the first day of our trip.  We left Austin shortly after noon on Tuesday, May 10, and landed in Pisa right about noon (Pisa time) today.  We had layovers in Dallas and London (Heathrow).  Flying overnight to LHR gave us a chance to try to sleep during Italy’s night and get ourselves on the new schedule straight away, but we only slept for the last 3-4 hours on the ~9 hour DFW-LHR flight (reading and watching Deadpool taking up some of the rest).

Having 2 hours in Heathrow was just enough for us to transfer terminals and make it through security and immigration; I’d guess that we had all of 10-15 minutes wait at the departure terminal for our last (BA-operated) leg into PSA.  All of the flights were uneventful and on time.  After picking up our rental car (which turned out to be a Renault crossover), Google Maps showed just over an hour drive to Podere San Lorenzo’s address.  I purchased a cheap TomTom 1515 world traveler edition a few weeks ago (cheaper than paying daily fees for the driving parts of this trip and our trip back to Italy in October for Vanessa & Kevin’s wedding!), and TomTom turned out to know of the road…but not have any street number data.  We thought we’d have it take us to the road, and we’d just drive along until we hit Via Allori 80.

I suppose the TomTom route planning message saying that ‘Your route includes unpaved roads. Continue?’ should have given us a hint of some of the fun ahead, but we plowed ahead.  It did take about an hour to get to the spot where we turned off on to Via Allori…but we then probably spent 20 minutes on what was essentially a usually-paved, very narrow road (more akin to a golf cart path) that wound its way up a mountain and past a series of spaced out estates.  The first few had no street numbering, and then we hit ’32’.  We were hoping that we were working upwards, as we passed property after property (plus some guesses at forks in the road, where it was hard to know which way was staying on the ‘road’ and which was some property’s ‘driveway’).  We eventually saw 69 and 70, thinking we must be close.  Soon after, we saw a wood street sign pointed to the next turn off for Podere San Lorenzo (yay!), down the hill a ways.  We’d made it!  (And with only one standoff with an opposing car; thankfully he was near farm access road to back into to let us by)

We parked just to the left of this picture (there is a small, freestanding building used as a reception just out of view) and heard a dog barking.  We were greeted by a little cute dog and a woman coming down from the main house (the elevated door towards the right of this picture).  Our room turned out to be the one in the right of this picture, room #1. It has a pretty nice view out towards the valley:

It’s hard to see get an idea of how great it looks out there, what with the lighting and the windows blocking things a bit.  Here is a picture from maybe 50 yards up the hill, just above the main building in the first picture:

We were shown around the property a bit, especially the core of the main building (seen in the first photo), as it is where breakfast and dinner are served.  It’s a pretty great space: the core building was a small chapel originally constructed in the 13th century.  We had originally reserved a dinner booking for tonight, but she told us that there was an issue with the water today (a service worker arrived right after us to deal with it), so they could not be certain if they’d be able to cook in time to make tonight’s dinner….so that’s pushed to tomorrow.  With the San Lorenzo dinner now set for tomorrow, we asked for some recommendations in the core of Volterra.  We thought we’d head into Volterra to wander around a bit and play tourists and kill time (it was ~3 PM at this point) and get dinner in the city.

In talking with our host about how to get to Volterra itself, we realized/confirmed what we’d thought about our treacherous drive up Via Allori: we came in the far end. It looped back on the main road, and San Lorenzo is close to the far end of Via Allori; we’d basically driven up a mountain and partway down it to get to the farm when we would have spent all of 2 minutes on the road if we had come from the other side.  It turns out that Volterra was quite nearby, taking us 10 minutes (perhaps a bit less) from San Lorenzo to a parking area in the core of the city.  We did manage to get turned around on our first attempt (leading us away from Volterra on the main road), but it resulted in me doing a turnaround at a random farm next to this:

Once in Volterra, we roamed the narrow old streets aimlessly, seeing what we found (but always on the lookout for gelato, which we of course found plenty of).  Kelly put her super long built-in-selfie-stick arms to use as we were out and about:

We found a cute little cafe called Empathy Bistro (odd name, but nice place) to have some wine to kill time until figuring out which place we wanted to go for dinner.

We killed a bit more time while delaying deciding on dinner, dropping into shops with plenty of food and wine offerings, like this pecorino overload:

We eventually picked what turned out to be a fabulous place for dinner: Osteria dei Poeti.  We don’t have anyone pictures from dinner, but the website shows the inside of the place.  The food was fabulous, as was the excellent Super Tuscan (a Bolgheri) we paired with it.  Kelly has an account on here as well, so I’ll prod her to spill some detail on her meals.

It’s now about 11:30 PM local time, and we’re pretty beat.  Up tomorrow: breakfast here at San Lorenzo, then some TBD roaming (perhaps back to Volterra, or something else interesting nearby, like San Gimignano), and back in time for the 8 PM dinner here at San Lorenzo.