The beach.

 Amma needed to stick her feet in the ocean. It was chilly and cloudy here in Siena when we left so we loaded the car with jackets, rain ponchos and umbrellas. I plotted a path to the ocean one way, and home a different route. I briefly scanned the guidebook about what we might see and thought about seafood possibilities for lunch and scanned the section on Super Tuscan vineyards we might pass along the way. We found the sea! Deserted, relatively warm and not one shell in the sand. Sea level air temps were just right.

We found our seafood, too, after striking out thrice trying to navigate to places in the guidebooks. We concluded we do better stumbling upon eateries by dumb luck than trying to plan anything.

Something I read said we would find huge yachts anchored in this area but thankfully, we didn't. The Tyrrhenian Sea is part of the Mediterranean.

Not bad temps, where is everybody?

The view at our lunch spot was amazing, but these two friends captured my heart. They never stopped talking, looking at each other and laughing together.

We got the fried pupu platter for our 2nd course. Beady eyed shrimp looking at me is not my thing, not now, not ever. Fried everything else was delicious as was our first course: risotto with prawns for me, thick and lightly cheesed noodles with steamed clams for him.

Now, about the vineyards we saw today in the southwest part of Tuscany. 

I have to say they were head and shoulders above what we've seen in other drives around the area. The rows were straighter, the vines were tidier-everything looked manicured and...nicer. 

I learned these vintners went renegade in the 1970s by using non-standard grapes (think French) and the oldsters of the Italian wine industry went wild. They punished the winemakers by only letting them call their wine "table wine" but the wine makers added "of <insert location>" so consumers could find them again. The wines were so delicious and popular that the oldsters had to recognize the vinters and their product and let them into the club. Now they are known as Super Tuscans and fetch hundreds of euros per bottle.

The other thing we saw today were gorgeous olive groves attached to many of the vinyards. There is lots of "agroturismo" in the area which is exactly what it sounds like: farm stays on the working property. This might be the most gorgeous vista we saw today, and we saw plenty.

There is renegade wheat growing along the edges of the highway with the poppies, if they don't take it away at the Denver airport I'm bringing some home.

Finally, we had to get gas today. Ev usually can't see the prices because color blindness so for all of our married life I have called out the price of regular unleaded to him when we travel because that is just the kind of mental exercise he likes: figuring what euro/liter and kpl comes out to in dollar/gallon and mpg. He was adamant about going to a pump your own self and when I called out "1.71 and the station says Self" he whipped a U-turn. I took pictures of him biting his cuticle, rubbing his forehead and putting his hands on his hips while he tried to figure out the pump. Funny guy. 

Do credit cards have pins in Italy? he asked.