I’ve been saying all summer that I haven’t been doing enough training for this walk. Today revealed that wasn’t just talk. I knew there would be hills. That’s obvious. What hadn’t really sunk in was that walking in Tuscany, at least so far, means walking with very little shade under an intense sun. That image above looks great, right? But we were never among those groves of trees. This is what we got:

I’m so used to walking in England, which is wet and overgrown. This part of Italy is big open valleys with rolling hills. There is some shade cover in the lowlands, but today’s path hugged the high ground for the most part. It’s a dry climate, and the plants all have that look of heroically hanging on. There are lots of olive tree plantations and, though we didn’t see any today, vineyards, but there are also big fields where whatever crop is grown has been harvested.

But let me pause and go back to last night. Volterra is a truly lovely hilltop town with a brisk trade in carved alabaster and a lot of tourists getting ice cream and post cards, but also, at least on Saturday, a lot of people who I’d guess were in for the day form surrounding communities. And one thing that was drawing people, we learned on our way back to our hotel from dinner, was a big live rock concert in on of the central squares, which was blocked off at 9pm. Speakers were blasting recorded music, including “Tangled Up in Blue” sung in Italian (it sounded like everything except the phrase ‘tangled up in blue” was in Italian). We peeked into the square from an unblocked alley, and puzzled at the few people hanging out. What was going on? We walked around to one of the streets leading into the square the was blocked off and asked the security guards posted there what was going on. The concert starts at 11pm, they explained. Too late for us! We headed off to bed, but at 11, still awake and fighting pre-walk insomnia, I could hear whatever band was playing. It featured a lot of songs that have a chorus the crowd can chant along, so I got the filtered sound of an very excited crowd (my window didn’t even face in the right direction and was closed, but there was no way not to hear the music). Between that noise, the time change, and my pre-walk jitters, I probably got 4 hours of sleep at most. Not ideal for a day of walking in the sun as the temperature climbs into the 80s.

The first day of walking is drop-off and return walk back to Volterra, with aggressive elevation change at the end.

Just look at that relentless climb starting at the 10km mark. Oof. That’s 300 meters of elevation gain in 4.3 miles. Fortunately, the travel notes mentioned that there are three buses a day that can pick you up right around the 10km mark and get you up to Volterra: one around 9, one at 11:30, and one in the late afternoon. I stored that away, and the knowledge came in handy.

We were dropped off literally at the side of the road where a gravel secondary road wound into the distance. Off we went.

The first day of any new walk involves a learning curve as you figure out how good the written directions are, and what the writer of those directions considers worth mentioning. After the first few good details noted at the distance into the walk in kilometers, there was mention that at the 2.7km point we’d pass a modern oval sculpture on our left, and .1km later there was some side road to ignore and not go down. After we’d checked off the first few notes and folllowed what we were sure was the right path, we apparently walked blithely past piece of modern art dropped in the rural landscape and took no notice.

We kept going, and going. The temperature kept rising. We shed elevation and the gravel road wound through farm fields and, just that one time, right past a very modern house and right after it a tired old farm with an abandoned main house. We kept going. Now, I am okay at gauging miles that I’ve walked, but I don’t have as good a feel for kilometers. (I know it’s just a simple matter of conversion, but somehow if you tell me to look for something in 1.5 kilometers, my brain shuts off and I keep walking until I see that thing.

But after a LOT of walking, Karen and I both got the feeling that something was wrong. My deep fear was that we had missed a turn. So when we came to a place where a road came in at a sharp angle from the left, we stopped and I loaded GPS mapping to try to compare it to the downloaded, non-interactive map of the walk. This is me puzzling things out:

After a few minutes of tough deliberation, I concluded we were at the 5.8km mark, where we were supposed to take that sharp turn. We’d walked nearly 2 miles beyond the mysterious unseen sculpture. My guess is that it was near that modern house in the slideshow above, and we were so distracted by the house that we missed the sculpture, which would have been somewhere across the road. Who knows.

Relieved that we had walked so much further than we thought, we headed down the road. All good. But the heat was growing oppressive, and though I didn’t say anything about it to Karen for a while, I was already thinking very seriously about that bus at around the 7.5 mile mark.

Interesting thing about the landscape today: In all those rolling field, we saw one flock of sheep. I’m so used to hiking in agrarian areas meaning walking across fields with sheep or cows grazing. That’s not how it works in Italy. We won’t, I think, be walking across privately owned fields. We’ll be on gravel roads, paved roads and footpaths. And so far there are just fewer animals. So much so that we were pretty excited when we saw a man walking his two dogs.

We finally came to the end of our gravel road and joined a paved road, which immediately began rising. The sun was starting to take it’s toll, and around this point or perhaps a bit before, I floated the idea of the bus, if we could make the 11:26 stop. Karen, good sport that she is, agreed with that, though she was suffering just a bit less from the heat than I was.

The road kept climbing, and we hit the 11km mark and the entrance to an Agroturismo (a farm that takes guests to show off their farm). And there was the bus stop. It was 11:20. I was spent. I gulped more water (I’d been trying to hydrate steadily all morning, but sweating away water at a prodigious rate) and sat down in a state of early heat exhaustion. Karen was doing better than I was, but was ready for that bus. So we waited. And we waited some more. We agreed that if no bus came, we’d call a taxi, because those last few miles were going to be brutal. At 11:40, we declared the bus a no-show, and Karen called for a taxi. It would come between 12:30 and 1. Taxis are busy in the Volterra area. So we sat and waited. We’d had a lovely walk, and the lessons for the day were twofold. First, we need to pay a bit more attention to the directions and distances. And second, it’s not a race and no one will get medals for finishing or penalized for not completing every step of the walk.

Back at the hotel, after I did a bit of lying still and sipping water, we adjusted tomorrow’s taxi drop-off (I don’t know why, but three of our five days of walking start with being driven somewhere) to be several miles further along the way to our next stop, San Gimignano. And though we can’t change our taxi pickup time of 9:30 (too late for our taste), we are still optimistic, because tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy and stay in the upper 70s further into the day. And the two miles we cut off the start of our walk are all uphill, and the miles after that are mostly downhill, so we’ve saved ourselves the harder work of going up. Every walk is a new adventure!