{"id":3539,"date":"2011-10-14T10:42:39","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T08:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.astroblastro.com\/?p=3539"},"modified":"2011-10-14T10:49:37","modified_gmt":"2011-10-14T08:49:37","slug":"road-trip-to-saturnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/?p=3539","title":{"rendered":"Road Trip to Saturnia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe you’re waiting in a tiny laundromat for your clothes to dry and you strike up a conversation with the couple of people in there with you. That might lead to a lunch at il Raddi<\/em> a delicious little hole in the wall restaurant that serves a plate of pasta al pomodoro<\/em> for \u20ac2.50. That conversation may stretch out for two hours. Maybe you’ll be told of a beautiful hot spring\u00a0in south Tuscany called Saturnia. Maybe that leads you and three co-conspirators to rent a car and drive down for a night.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Travelers make friends fast.<\/h1>\n

It took us much longer to get down to the hot spring than we had planned.\u00a0 A Helikoser from San Francisco, Ramshackle Nikolas,<\/a> drove while fellow American Chelsea, Aussie Izzy and I contributed by being terrible navigators. We took the scenic route, a road that is equally winding and beautiful so we stopped a lot along the way. That meant we got to scramble around on the stone walls of San Quirico d’Orcia, picking figs and peeking past garden gates.<\/p>\n

We found ourselves a spot on the top of a hill to see the sunset over a misty valley and stargazed at the entrance to an electric candle lit graveyard. We knew we were on the right road to the hot spring and followed the a sign but somehow missed it and had to perform a 10 point turn under a bridge at a golf course. We retraced our route and asked a man at the restaurant at the edge of town. “Just down the road there, you can’t miss it,” he said.<\/p>\n

It was something like nine o’clock when we finally found it. Jupiter and the full moon lit the natural mineral pools, already moon white, in a beautiful pale light. Before we dipped in Nicolas and I made some very ugly sandwiches\u2014without the modern convenience of a knife\u2014and we all devoured them before lugging our bottiglia di vino <\/em>down to the edge and slipped into the water.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was a really charming spot. I’d definitely go again, though the water was about ten degrees cooler that I had expected and my clothes all smell like Yellowstone now. We cruised back to Firenze on the fast road through Siena and got back to the car rental place with a half hour to spare.<\/p>\n

More photos here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you’re waiting in a tiny laundromat for your clothes to dry and you strike up a conversation with the couple of people in there with you. That might lead to a lunch at il Raddi a delicious little hole in the wall restaurant that serves a plate of pasta al pomodoro for \u20ac2.50. That…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,168],"tags":[372,173,371,429],"class_list":["post-3539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-journal","category-travel","tag-hot-spring","tag-italy","tag-saturnia","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3539"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3558,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3539\/revisions\/3558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/astroblastro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}