Tour of Tuscany

On Tuesday, we took what was "supposed" to be a food and wine tour of Chianti and Umbria....

Well, we wound up in Tuscany at Cortona and Montepulciano, and there was hardly any food or wine...  Moo urns!!!  First we drove to Cortona, a very very very long drive. It was a very beautiful town, but very hilly!  (Another thing they neglected to mention on their website). We tried walking up the hill to what they said would be a fantastic view, but every time the humans reached the top of a hill, the next hill was steeper than the previous one. Eventually, they decided just to go for a coffee, which was just fine with me. Mooey glad to be a faux fur, since there are virtually no public washrooms and you have to buy a coffee if you want to use the washroom at any cafe (they said you're lucky if there's a toilet seat, soap, running water, toilet paper and paper towels or a hand dryer)....

Coffee in Cortona

Hilly Cortona

More hilly Cortona

Crazy hilled alleys in Cortona

Beautiful view in Tuscany

Next we went to a "rustic restaurant" for lunch. They meant "let's pitch olive oil on you and hope you buy lots and lots of stuff!" We'd heard we were going to taste olive oil, local cheeses, dairy and meats.  Nope, just 3 small pieces of bread with olive oil and spreads....  I was mooey hungry!!!!

The tour guide was very good and informative, but it felt more like a sight seeing/shopping tour to us. I wasn't about to spend my hard earned cow coins so I let the hums spend theirs.

The lunch was pretty filling but not that tasty. It was pasta with eggplant, then some sort of unidentifiable meat with roasted pepper, and desert was some stale cake/bread thing drizzled with chocolate....

Then we moved onto Montepulciano, the same place that the Twilight movie New Moon filmed their "Italy" scenes. Turns out the fountain was a fake built just for the movie (darn, I didn't get to re-enact it!!!). We visited a few wine cellars which was cool, and the wine master at the first place kept plying wine on everyone which was nice (the hums suspected it was in hopes people would buy more if they were drunk).

Wine cellar in Montepulciano

Square in Montepulciano that New Moon was filmed

 Overall, the tour was pretty, just not what we expected.  Ah well....