After Tuesday’s supposedly easier loop day (yes, I am still way behind), Wednesday’s scheduled walk was a 15.6 mile trek from San Gimignano to Colle di Val d’Elsa. Fortunately, this one had not only a way to catch a bus at around the 12.5-mile mark and coast into Colle di Val d’Elsa, but also an ‘escape route’ about 6.5 miles in where you could go up a hill into Campiglia, catch a different bus, and really trim off the miles.

I love the sound of the escape route at Campiglia, which sounds to me like the title of a lost Alistair MacLean novel. We didn’t have to go in disguise as local peasants or figure out who among our numbers was feeding information to the enemy, but we sure as hell did a bit of daring walking up that last hill on a heavily trafficked set of switchbacks with no sidewalk and very little space off the road. I will be played in the film version by Gregory Peck.

If you’ve been thinking ‘boy, Hank is floundering, but that Karen is a dynamo,’ you are correct. Even after the loop trail, Karen was still thinking maybe, just maybe, she’d go for the majority of this hike and catch the bus for that last bit.

The day started out from San Gimignano taking yet another different road down from the heights. The clink clink of metal walking pole tips on the pavement was our companion as we got down off the hill and came to a turnoff onto a dirt and gravel path that was marked with the sign of the Via Francigena. Yes, this day mostly follows this ancient pilgrimage route, which can be traced all the way from Canterbury to Rome. (Thanks for thinking that might be the next great adventure, but, um, no.) My solo week of walking is on the Via Francigena, so it’s fun to see it on this leg of the trip.

The path was pretty nice, descending almost aggressively, in a hurry to get down to the shady bottom.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in hiking that what goes down into a pleasant shaded spot by a little stream most go up a son-parched open field. And so it was. We had to cut around a vineyard on a steep hillside, and the vineyard’s placement suggests that the grapes had wisely chosen to grow downhill to avoid having to climb the next bit.

Look at the posture of these hikers who passed us while we paused at the top of the vineyard. Karen is basically pointing her camera at flat level. They’re marching up. This is me at that moment, with the bottom half of the hill behind me:

That look on my face is “what the heck, we’re only 5.4 kilometers in, and even to make our escape, we have to get to 10.4.”

But we were in strangely good spirits, probably because by this point Karen had resolved to join me on the escape route, so we knew it wasn’t as long a day. We stopped to rest by a little stream where two other hikers, a young couple, had also stopped. After some respectful silence and after a family of hikers passed through, the young man asked where we are from.

There really are a few standard hiking conversation gambits. You can start with this gentle way in, talking about where you are from. Chicago, Pittsburgh, they’re both from Venice, Karen makes a little joke that they’ve escaped the film festival, the young woman says ‘barely’ in a way that lets us know the joke has landed perfectly. The next moves in the conversation are about where you’ve just come from, where you are headed today, how far you are going beyond that. We did all that and then kept a few minutes of pleasant silence before they set out again. We gave them a few more minutes to get ahead so it wouldn’t feel like we were dogging their tracks, and then set out ourselves. A perfect hiker interaction.

Somewhere along in this stretch, we saw a series little signs on trees with what we figured were inspirational messages.

And a few more miles passed in sweaty tramping, heat rising into the mid-80s. (Are you getting the twin themes of this whole trip? Heat and hills.)

We stopped for a good long pause where we were turning off the trail, going up a switchback road to get to a little town. We paused for a good long bit, then made our way up the hill to a cute little town that had the feel somehow of being a suburb. The bus stops, one on each side of the road for the two directions a bus could go, were right outside a little cafe that seemed to be the hub of the town. Maybe of we’d explored side streets or been somewhere off this main street we’d have encountered a whole world of little shops and businesses and for all I know a disco. But from where we waited for a bus for about 45 minutes, it was a sleepy town lapsed into a midday daze.

Bus came! We boarded and I monitored our progress on Google Maps to make sure we didn’t miss the whole bloody town of Colle di Val d’Elsa. We didn’t. And of course, the bus dropped us off in the modern lower town, but our accommodation was in the historic hilltop old town. Up. Some muttering under breath.

But a lovely little place, tucked into three buildings stitched together from what we could tell.

Yeah, that photo in front of the door was taken later in the day, after a shower and change into a nicer outfit.

We lucked into yet another extraordinary meal. This one I had smoked cheese baked in a puff crust and served with shaved summer vegetables, and pasta with an incredible toasted bread crumb and anchovy sauce served with a smear of sweet beet around the outside. And over this meal, we came to an important agreement. Our last day of hiking, to get to Siena, is only 12.4 miles, but we’ve both had enough. There was a bus option, and we were ready to embrace it. So, as Rambling Hank turns into a blog about trying to stay cool and eat good food in Italy, enjoy these images of my dinner.