Over my travels, I’ve done a mix of walking with one or two other people and walking alone. My tradition has become to make most trips a combination of alone time and walking in company. As I’ve noted a number of times over the years, that’s a good mix for me, indulging my introvert need for time alone but also incorporating the pleasures of sharing the road, chatting along the way, having someone else to point out the things I don’t notice, acting as support and sounding board when the going gets tough. I don’t want to hike with a big group, and certainly not with strangers in some sort of organized walk. I understand that some people thrive on that version of hiking as away to meet new and interesting people, but that is, to be quite honest, not what I’m in the rambling game for. I’ve met enough darn people. Harrumph. (Obviously, I’m kidding, but only to an extent.)

Iling game for. I’ve met enough darn people. Harrumph. (Obviously, I’m kidding, but only to an extent.)

I’ve been pretty darn fortunate in my walking companions. And that paid on the loop walk around the countryside near San Gimignano. Mac’s Adventure rates this 15.7 km (9.7 mile) walk as “easy to moderate,” which just goes to show that language is an arbitrary construct and words mean different things to different people. Let’s take a look.

Look at that nice big set of arrows and those gentle shadings suggesting pretty hills.

Now, let’s take a look at that walk from an elevation change perspective.

Hmm, from around 3km to 4km you go up 50 meters in a kilometer. Okay. Between about 6.75 and 7.25 you go up 100 meters. Um? Then you do some bits and bobs until, at the end of your walk, starting around the 13km mark, you go back up to San Gimignano’s hilltop defenses, about 170 meters of elevation gain in 2.7 kilometers. That’s some serious hills.

And the heat and sun catch up with you. We started out with a spring in our step, but I knew from yesterday about that last slog up to San Gimignano. Today we’d be looping around and coming back into town from the north, but not much difference in terms of the uphill push.

Note the slightly grim look of determination. C’mon man, this is only 9.7 miles. I can do this.

The gravel roads were good walking too, and we only had a few stretches of paved road that were a bit scary because cars and trucks whiz by at quite a clip.

It’s gorgeous country. And we saw some slightly more ripened olives. (Olives, as youlearned readers no doubt already know, are harvested in Tuscany in October and early November, so it’s early days for olives right now.)

But the hike wore on, and the sun is intense, and after our lunch break, the breaks got more frequent. Another hill (that one between 7 and 8 km in the elevation chart above) had me and Karen tired.

From there, even when the walking was easier, it just got harder as the heat climbed into the mid-80s. Gorgeous countryside, but whoof.

And here’s where it pays to pick your walking companions wisely. As the day wore on, I talked less, stopped more, and was generally not the best companion. I mean, who flies to a foreign country to walk in complete silence while their brother pants and calls halts halfway up hills?

I wanted to write that Karen became my cheerleader, but that isn’t right. Cheerleaders urge the team into action, pushing them on to victory. Karen was my support. She stayed positive, but listened and respected my expressions of concern that I thought those last few miles might be a problem.

And so, when we started up the first portion of the last epic ascent (good God, I sound like Edmund Hillary), as my 3.5 liters of water came near its end, Karen affirmed that these hiils were hard, and she was simply using each spot of shade further up the hill, even if only five or ten yards up, as the next goal. Little goals, little achievements. And by heavens, I made it to the top of a gravel road, where, our reading of the trail guide indicated, we would turn left onto the paved road for the last 2.7 km push. At that 15 km point, the guide suggested, you might stop at the charming little vineyard/wine shop across the road. Well, I had determined that I was done. Just done. I was perhaps a mile and a half from the hotel, with a fricking pool, and I just couldn’t do it. So Karen and I walked across the road, to find that the charming chance to taste and buy a bottle of wine wasn’t opened. We paused in a shaded spot to try to figure out how to get a taxi for me. Karen, brave soul, was ready to finish on her own.

As if by a miracle (the Catholic country is getting to me already), a postal worker drove up at this moment and stopped her little truck to deliver mail in someone’s mailbox which just happened to be in that shade. I asked, in my most plaintive tones, if she spoke English. The universal “tiny bit” finger-and-thumb gesture. Did she know of a taxi company I could call? Taxi is a good universal word. She held up a finger– wait– and went to her little truck and placed a call to someone and got a phone number, which she wrote on a piece of paper. Brought it back to me, walked me through the number (thank heavens, because her 9 looked like a 0 to me), and went on her way. I called for a cab. Busy now. Ninety minute wait. This is how tired I was, and totally out of water and already borrowing sips from Karen: I opted to wait 90 minutes by a dusty roadside and watch the cars go by while Karen walked on. A surprisingly, not to say distressingly, short time later, Karen texted that she was back at the hotel. (She reports that she thought it was a distressingly long time between our parting and her texting her arrival, which just goes to show that time is relative.)

And then a call, clearly from the number I had dialed a while ago to get this cab. “Where are you?” I rehearsed again that I was on the road at the turnoff for an Azienda, tried my best again to pronounce the full name of the Azienda Agricola as if I were an old hand at Italian, and said again that I was going to the Hotel Villa Belvedere. I had a moment’s dread that I had somehow given them the impression that I wanted to be picked up at the hotel to go to some obscure roadside dropoff, for some weird nefarious purposes that taxi drivers never question, but no. As the man on the phone said “In one minute taxi,” a car pulled up and the most noble hero of legend and song opened the back door to the taxi for me to get in. I made it 10 kilometers and change, which is a pretty pathetic 6.2 miles unless you understand what I was really up against.

Karen had gotten me through this day, and was nice enough to remind me that when she’d had tough times on the Cornwall Coast Walk we did together, I’d gotten her through bad bits. And she even stopped at a little shop near our hotel to buy me a Coke Zero, which she kept in her room fridge for me until I got picked up. That’s a good walking companion.

And this, my friends, is how you end such a day. (And of course, I am lying in the shade.)