Venice to Siena | Agriturismo Malafrasca

Venice to Siena:  A Travel Day: Everyone was packed and ready to head down to the dock at 9:30. We walked the short distance, dragging our luggage behind us and met our reserved water taxi for the scenic cruise to the main land - a clustered maze of parking lots, bus terminals, and car rental agencies.

We found the car rental agency (hauling our luggage behind us, once again) and stood in line for nearly one hour before it was our turn at the rental counter. Papers were signed and we were told to go wait outside for our vehicle - a Fiat 9 passenger van. We waited and waited and waited. Finally 35 minutes later, a big blue van was parked on the street below and we dragged our stuff down there. A guy opened the door, said, "Taylor?" and walked away.

We decided this was our van. It was filthy inside - complete with dog hair on the seats - and had soda spilled over the console. Nice and sticky. For this vehicle, we are paying $1200 for the week! We cleaned it up best we could and hit the road - knowing we were lucky to get out of Venice with a vehicle that had wheels instead of a rutter.

DT drove. Woody navigated with the help of maps and my GPS. We decided to drive down the coast, and then cut over the mountains to our next destination - Siena. The drive down the coast was most unspectacular, but once we headed inland the countryside turned nearly familiar to us - it looked just like the area around Newberg, Oregon - and then it turned mountainous and the van climbed over a 3000 ft. pass.

The view to Tuscany

We stopped at the summit and had a snack - ice cream bar this time. It was here we learned the window latch on the van was broken and there would be no way of securing the car! We continued on towards Siena, passing again near Florence and arrived at our rental house - Agriturismo Malafrasca - for the week.

The view from our terrace in Siena


View from Malafrasca (jrw)


Our bedroom


One of the three bathrooms


The living area

Our place is great, but it could have used a good cleaning. Three bedrooms, each with a bath, and a main living area. There is a small kitchen with a cook-top and a sink. The best feature is the huge terrace with a fabulous view of rolling hill, acres of grapes and fabulous villas surrounded by trees. After settling-in, we headed into town to the Coop Supermarket. This is a gigantic supermarket, like a Safeway on steroids. Our plan was to purchase snack foods, wine, coffee and bread for breakfast and stop at a restaurant for dinner on the way back to Malafrasca. Well, the market was quite interesting and maybe we bought a few things we didn't need - olives, cheeses, tomatoes, strawberries, baguettes, salamis, sliced cured beef, seafood salad... even a coffee maker ($15) because we could not make it a week without coffee for breakfast and there wasn't one in the kitchen. (Our gift to the house.)

We stopped at a casual restaurant on the way - the tables were filled with mounds of delicious-looking foods and it smelled fabulous, but they were full and would not have a table for quite a while. The next place we stopped had people in suits getting out of their Jaguars. I went in and decided it was a bit too toney for our casually-attired road-weary crowd.

No worries - we had a van full of food! Woody put on a spread fit for a King. Of course, now we are out of food and definitely out of wine, but it was delicious. We dined and laughed until we were just too tired to eat another olive and retired to our beds to dream of Tuscany.

Woody prepares our feast


Seafood salad