Day 29: Liberation Day, Parades and Siena.

The revelers who kept me up Saturday into Sunday must have gotten it all out if their system because it was very quiet last night! Woke up and realized there wasn't any milk left so I made a run to my favorite neighirhood store:

On the way I saw a building I hadn't noticed before:

It had statues on it:

Well when I bought the train tickets to Siena on Saturday the woman who sold me the tickets assured me that there was a direct train to Siena every hour and coming back the same. I asked her again about Monday, knowing it was a holiday, and again she assured me that the schedule was the same. I got everyone up and out by 8:45 to catch the 9:10 train.

When we arrived at the station there wasn't any train at 9:10 to Siena! I went to ask the station attendant who informed me the next direct train to Siena was at 11:10 as it is a Holiday. Whoops!

So a trip for coffee out and back to the townhouse to book tickets for the Uffizi tomorrow and we were ready to head out again.

And we ran into a Liberation Day Parade:

On the train we met some nice young people working on organic farms from the US and Brazil. 

We got stuck on the train at Badesse for over half an hour -- we never did find out why, which got us in to Siena even later than we had already been planned with our already altered schedule  -- ugh! 

We made our way across the street from the train station into a mall and stumbled into a series of escalators which took us far up the hill -- perfect! 

It was a beautiful walk into the old part of Siena:

About 20 minutes later we were finally at the restaurant I had found with a partial view of the Duomo. Some of us had to sit outside and some inside which made it a bit difficult-- especially as it was a bit nippy outside. 

Lunch was delicious but it took quite awhile to have all of us served -- it was one of the finest pastas we had had:

We went over to San Domenic's church and then over to the Duomo -- beautiful! I didn't take pictures there as I had many from our first trip-- I'm more excited about 'seeing' thing in the streets that I hadn't seen before:

We ran into yet another parade:

What a day! 

We got turned around and ended up at walking the long way backntonthebtrain station -- arriving just after our train left. We waited the hour for the next train. 

We got back into town just before 8 -- got pizza and salad to go and everyone got to bed early.

All in all a beautiful day -- made moreso by being together and experiencing the countryside!

Total steps walked today: 23,514 -- 9.07 miles