We made our way back to the car and started to make our way back towards Spannocchia.
The landscape was just as gorgeous on the way back -funny how that works- and we started looking for a good place to pull off.
We found this spot, which apparently a popular place to stop, as another car or two stopped here too, while we were here!
I'm not sure if this spot is called Artemio, or if we were entering into Artemio here...
Apparently these knobbly hills behind the row of trees are actually the Crete Sinese, not all the rolling hills we'd been admiring all day! That is, if I understood what our Czech-American-Italian (yes, I think we got his full life history!) photographer from the other car told us!
We made our way back to Taverna d'Arbia- the town with the factory building- and were about to hop back on the highway, when we saw that the on-ramp was closed, and blocked by the police!
Uh-oh.
At first we tried going in the other direction on the highway and turning around- maybe it was just something at this on-ramp that was the problem? So we turned around and went past that factory building again.
On our way back in the correct direction, there was a big detour set up- lots of cones, lots of police, and so we followed the detour, and guess what? There's that factory again!
So now what? Well, on the map, it looks like we could take another side road to get us back to the little towns leading up to Spannocchia. In fact, if the laws of little roads didn't apply, it looked more direct!
The laws of little roads, by the way are:
1. you will invariably get stuck behind a stupidly slow vehicle with no way to pass, and
2. there are always more twists and turns and a slower speed limit so no matter how much shorter it is distance-wise, it will always be further time-wise.
Fortunately, we were in Italy, so we didn't have to worry so much about law 1. Law 2 could be a bit of a concern, but it didn't look like we had much of a choice! Unfortunately, we also had to confront law 3, which applies specifically to roads in Italy:
3. roads have no names or numbers, or if they do, they are not well-marked in this regard. Roads have signs that direct you to some city, town, village or obscure intersection that is somewhere further along down the road. This landmark may be nearby, or it may be clear across the country- the signs don't really need to specify.
Law 3 makes navigation rather difficult for the newly initiated to a given region! Our navigation skills went into overdrive as we tried to figure out how to get home.
At first it seemed ok, as AM and I frantically tried to pinpoint the names on the signs on our maps to verify we were in fact going in the right direction. The countryside was as lovely as all we had been seeing all day, and hey, the best way to know an area is to get off the highways and explore the side roads, right?
Then the pavement just stopped.
The road continued, but the pavement stopped. Mind you, I don't think any of us have anything against dirt roads, but somehow the line on the map seemed a little too major to correspond to a dirt road. This is where we started running into the problem of relying on maps purchased six time zones away, rather than locally: all the tiny little local roads are on the really detailed maps that you can probably only find here, but are not shown anywhere else. My guess is that due to this omission we turned left (or right?) onto a road that was not the road we thought it was.
In any case, after bumping along for several kilometers on a twisty, turny dirt road, we finally ended up back on a road we could identify on one of our maps!
This road, by the way, is not the dirt road of the story- note the nice, smooth pavement!
We managed to make our way onto a main road -after driving over it, then under it, then around it - that sent us north to Siena. We crossed the blocked-off highway we were trying to avoid, then before we knew it we were coming up to, then driving along, the big, brick city walls of Siena!
This really wasn't where we were trying to go, but T was definitely excited to see city walls! And good thing, too, because the poor girl had to keep driving with our miserable directions, or lack thereof, and by now the sun had already set and it was starting to get dark! Actually, AM and I were pretty frustrated too, because we are generally pretty good navigators!
From here we managed to turn ourselves around to get to the road to Spannocchia we were ultimately trying to find. The little stretch of highway was really only a few kilometers, but in trying to detour around it, our trip home from Asciano took
two hours longer than our trip there in the first place!
Finally, we got home just as the last rays of daylight were fading away. We made a yummy Spannocchia dinner, played cards, enjoyed some limoncello, and said goodnight to our first full day in Tuscany!
