Day two - Perugia and Castiglione Del Lago

The thing with all these little towns is that you never quite know what you're going to get until you get there. Some look great from a distance, but aren't much when you actually get to them, some promise heaps in the guide books, but then don't deliver when you arrive and some which hardly rate a mention turn out to be real gems.

On Monday we visited Perugia, which is just down the road from Corona. It turned out to be a far bigger city than we realised (guide books in the, at this stage, still missing bags), with a population of 150,000. Being a city that large, built on a hill top, parking anywhere near it is difficult. It also suffers from having one way streets that go from the top of the hill to the bottom - a bit like the snakes in 'snakes and ladders' once your on them, you go all the way to the bottom to start winding your way back up. We did that a couple of times before we found a car park that only had a short queue. The historic town centre (once we found it) was built on a grand scale, with the usual cathedral, town hall, fountain - all built on a grand scale. Despite its rating, we felt that Perugia was a bit overrated to the point that we started looking at all the post cards we could find outside the shops to make sure we were seeing all the sites - an old trick we've learned. If it's worth seeing it's on a post card. Having confirmed that we'd seen it all, we decided to head to somewhere smaller for lunch.

It was while we were in Perugia, that we managed to get hold of Singapore Airlines to find out that our bags had arrived on the flight from Singapore to Rome that morning and would be dropped off late afternoon to early evening. This was a cause for some celebration.

We had a late lunch in Castiglioni Del Lago (castle by the lake - I think), which is about 10 minutes down the road from the villa. Castiglioni is the typical walled town, with a street down the centre leading to the main Piazza. We found a restaurant with nice views across the lake and shaded tables with white table cloths. The head waiter also had an All Blacks tie, so we decided it met all our requirements.

With the courier threatening to arrive in the afternoon, we headed back to the villa to await the arrival of our bags.