After four brave days of walking in intense heat, we faced an easy decision. For day five, we were being picked up in the morning and dropped off at the base of Monteriggioni, an incredibly well-preserved walled fortress put up by the Sienese as an outpost in their seemingly endless battles with the Kingdom of Florence in the 1200s. We could: get out and start hiking for the 12.5 mile trek to Siena; get out, walk up the hill, see the fortress/village and then head on to Siena on foot; or, stay with me here, see the fortress and then walk to a nearby bus stop and ride a regional bus into Siena.

We knew damn well which we were doing. Buses are a wonderful thing, and you should take several on every foreign excursion, just to see what they are like wherever you visit. That’s my excuse for not walking. Karen was in complete agreement.

It was made even better by the fact that the driver who was dropping us off at Monteriggioni offered to take us up to the entrance so we wouldn’t have to hike 200 yards uphill. We didn’t tell him we weren’t hiking; just let him believe we would see the sights and then march on like marines.

It’s a great little spot, but with, to be frank, not a lot to do. There’s a very small museum with a great selection of reproduction bits of armor and weaponry that you are allowed to touch. Just hefting a handful of chain mail helps you appreciate how strong soldiers in the Middle Ages were.

Once you’ve seen the museum, which is four rooms in a short loop to get you back to the gift shop/entrance, you have three other things to do in Monteriggioni: climb up and walk the outer walls, shop, or eat. The whole place is about 200 yards in diameter. So we climbed up the stairs to the top off the walls. Despite this vaguely concerning warning at the bottom of the stairs, we saw no bees.

The views of the whole valley to the north (where those damn Florentines would be coming from) and to the south (Siena, a soldier’s beloved homeland) were of course stunning. I mean, you don’t build a whole fort where you can’t see what’s going on.

And we walked the length of the place, and though you can imagine we were tempted, did not buy shoes.

At this point, we had about two hours to kill before the bus to Siena down at the bottom of the hill, so we bought sodas and found a little park not on the main drag (the ‘village’ has two very narrow side streets off to one side of the main shopping/tourism drag) and idled for a while. When we could stretch this out no longer, we headed down the hill (multo steep!) and ended up killing another 30 minutes or so before catching our bus at this rather vividly statued roundabout.

The bus ride was straightforward, and in thirty or forty minutes we were in Siena, where we would have all of Friday to see the sites. And Karen’s husband Tim was arriving soon after we were, so late in the afternoon, we did a first round of tourism by visiting Siena’s famous piazza where the Palio, a horse race in which riders from the city’s contrade, or city wards, ride at breakneck speed around the piazza while massive crowds go wild.

We also stopped and had cocktails. Karen had an Aperol Spritz, the classic, I had a Hugo Spritz with St. Germain elderflower liqueur, prosecco and a splash of soda. Yum.

We were crazy hungry at 7pm, and most of the restaurants seemed to open at 7:30, so we ended up having pizza at a sidewalk restaurant that was on a hill that is apparently beloved of motorscooter riders and drivers of adorable little cars. A bit noisier than we’d have preferred, but the pizzas were really good. A good day, if not an epic hike.