Cortona then Magione - 30 September 2022

Fairly peaceful night, don’t think either of us are particularly bothered by road noise. 6.45am though, the bins were emptied, then a man went whizzing around and around in the carpark with his road sweeper - obviously time to get up!

The weather is still decidedly iffy, but decided to just get going. Tintin driving today. About 40 minutes to Cortona (population 22,500). It’s perched on a steep hillside overlooking Lake Trasimeno. Substantial parts of the town’s Etruscan walls are incorporated into the medieval structure, there are cobbled streets.

Proper moho parking spaces, glad we were there fairly early, as when we left the top carpark was already full. It’s great - there are escalators up into the town!

It’s very quaint, with lots of narrow shops, and narrow lanes.

We stopped off at a cafe sort of place, and bought two slices of apple cake to take away (€5) - was fresh, light and full of apples!

There were lots of museums and art galleries. Outside the church was the bronze ‘Tree of Life’. Once again, spectacular views as we were up so high. Definitely nothing special inside the church, although a German tour guide was very enthusiastic with her listeners!

I actually got to touch a cat! They seem very few and far between - probably because we’ve been visiting cities!

We got back to Dave just as the heavens opened, so sat in Dave with a cuppa and plotted where to go next…

Tintin drove again, about another 40 minutes. But! It certainly rained hard - as you can see from the video, if we couldn’t hear the music because of the rubbish roads, it was because we were drowned out by the heavy rain!

We thought about going and parking near the huge lake, but really wanted to be on a hard surface.

Tintin had a bit of a stressful drive (for me anyway!) near the end. Very steep slopes, obviously wet, and Dave turning sharp corners - more wheel spinning and thoughts of oh no, if we stop, we’ll never get going again on this hill. Of course he managed fine. Then Co-pilot threw a curve ball, and we ended up in some very dubious narrow streets, and had to turn around (only one place to do so!) - and we eventually found the moho parking spot in Magione. It’s actually ok, very quiet - with views over the countryside.

Had a late lunch about 1.30pm, then waited for the thunder and heavy rain to stop - about 4pm - and went for a wander.

Not a lot to see! Went up high to the Torre dei Lombardi - but didn’t want to pay to go inside. There was only one car up there, probably the person taking money - not a profitable day!

Got a bit disoriented walking back, luckily I’d dropped a pin on my Mapstr app, so got back without getting wet.

My picture isn’t good, as I missed the drain pipe at the top - but we haven’t seen this before - a chain hanging down to disperse the water instead of it pouring out of the gutter.

We’re using a sim from a Spanish company called Tiekom. So we have 300GB of data per month for €40 per month. The only downside is we can’t download and watch BBC iPlayer - so we’ll have a lot of catching up to do come November!

We’ve used 94GB in two weeks. I have a theory, which is possibly wrong, but we’ve also whizzed through data at a scary rate on previous trips, using up to 10GB overnight! (maybe something to do with our photos and iCloud storage?). However, when we bought a sim for my phone a few years ago, I used my phone lots, phoned home - barely used any data. Maybe you get penalized for being foreign!

Shock horror, actually cooking tonight - chicken curry! When in Italy and all that!

The forecast for rain isn’t as heavy for tomorrow, then next week looks back to sunshine 🌞