Day One - Cortona, essentials shopping and Montepulciano

After a good nights sleep, broken only by waking up at 2am - 7 hours sleep, pretty good. We were up at 6:00am and ready to face the day. Fortunately, everybody's still in that mode, so we were all up for breakfast by 7:00am, which we had beside the pool looking out over the valley.

After the rain on the first day, today was beautiful. After a leisurely breakfast, we were ready to visit Cortona the nearest town to the villa. Cortona is your typical hill top tuscan town, that looks out over Lake Trasimeno and the Chiana Valley. Being on the top of a hill, you park the car at the bottom of the town and walk up the narrow winding streets to the Piazza (town square). I've attached a picture of a Cortona street scene. We went for a good look around the town, checked out all the leather goods, which is a local specialty, stopped for coffee and a snack and then headed off to find a lunch spot.

We found a nice little town called Passignano on the shores of Lake Trasimeno for lunch and then headed off to the nearby outlet shopping mall to buy some essential items to make up for not having any clothes due to our bags being stuck in Auckland.

We then visitied Montepulciano, another hill top town, which is famous for its ruby red wine. Again the calves got a good work out on the way to the Piazza at the top of the hill. Lots of fantastic shops and the views from the top of the hill over the olive and vine covered valleys with their quaint farm houses was just fantastic. As the temperature was about 30 degrees, we rewarded ourselves with a beer in the piazza before heading back to the villa for a communal dinner to discuss the days adventures.

I managed to survive until 10.30 tonight, and Anne did even better staying up until 11.30 and finding out from the travel agent what is supposed to be happening with our bags. Unsurprisingly, the late flight from Wellington meant they missed the plane to Singapore and are now doing double time to catch up with us. As I write this on Tuesday evening, we are waiting for a courier driver to arrive with our long lost luggage. As long as it gets here tonight, it will only have been a minor inconvenience, but you know what waiting for courier drivers are like, so lets not count our chickens until the bags have arrived.