Slow Sunday

After last night's late night, it was a lie-in for everyone this morning. That is everyone bar the cats, who still wanted their breakfast at 6.30am. Thankfully, once I'd served them their bowls of biscuits and unlocked their cat flap, they left us to our lie-ins undisturbed.

Thus, it wasn't until 9am that we all surfaced properly. There followed a slow morning of sipping coffee and tea, updating blogs, tweaking websites and reading books. The weather was strange today - fine when we first got up, then rainy with some rumbles of thunder, then sunny again, then rainy again. It was certainly a warm day and everything felt like it was taking twice as much effort as normal - or perhaps that was just the after-effects of the copious amounts of wine consumed last night and/or the very late night.

Come midday, Stuart and I popped down to Amanda's yet again, for more bread, eggs, milk and a couple of sachets of cat food. We really needed to do a full supermarket shop, but neither of us had the energy to face Esselunga, so we just stocked up on the basics to get us through until Monday.

We had a delicious lunch of omelette made with fresh eggs, tomatoes, pepper and courgette and ate out on the patio in the shade of the garden umbrella.

Sunshine on a plate!

After lunch, it was time to go and relieve Chris and Sue of their generous teenage-boy-sitting duties and remove Ben from their house, so Stuart, Sheila, Kerys and I hopped into the car for the short drive into Pescia. At this point the thunder was rumbling around and the weather up the valley looked truly moody - we hoped that further down it would be a little clearer as we were planning to go on to Montecarlo after picking up Ben.

The moody weather up the valley.

We arrived at Chris and Sue's at around 3.15pm to find all the boys looking rather tired and flaked out on the sofa in front of the TV. We hadn't spotted Chris and Sue's little car at the end of their drive, and assumed it was still where we'd all left it last night, so Stuart offered to drive Chris back to Santa Lucia to go and pick it up. The two grown-up boys headed off to Santa Lucia together, while Sue, Sheila and I sat in the kitchen chatting and drinking coffee. I think we all felt a little jaded today, but coffee and chatting were the perfect tonic. Chris and Stuart were soon back and joined us for coffee and lots more happy chatting around the kitchen table - and before we knew it, it was 5.15pm and high time we were relieving them of Ben and letting them get on with getting Henry and Erik ready for another night of waiting tables at the festa.

We said our goodbyes and headed in the direction of Montecarlo. We'd decided to pay another visit to Montecarlo because, according to a poster we'd seen there a couple of days ago, the town's impressive mediaeval fortress is open to the public between 4pm and 7pm on Saturdays and Sundays, and we were keen to have a closer look at it.

When we arrived in the town, we were surprised by how many cars were parked up, and as we walked up the main road into town, we came across a queue of cars and a small coach all heading for the town. We soon noticed that the occupants of the vehicles were very smartly dressed, and that some of the cars had white ribbons tied to their wing mirrors. It didn't take long to work out that there was a wedding party in town, and it looked very much like the smartly dressed guests were heading for the fortress. Indeed, on closer inspection it seemed that the fortress was closed for a private function, so once again we missed out on our chance to nose around.

The fortress might have been closed, but the restaurants and bars were all buzzing and there were people setting up an outdoor stage for an evening of poetry and songs. We were thus happy to sit down at a table outside the enoteca, drink wine (coke for Kerys and Ben) and eat a selection of snacks provided to accompany our drinks. We spent a very enjoyable couple of hours soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying each other's company.

Perfect way to spend a Sunday evening.

Eventually, we headed home - Stuart then went straight out again to our local pizzeria (Da Nerone) in Pietrabuona to pick up some pizzas for dinner and we all settled down to watch See No Evil, Hear No Evil on DVD.

None of us can quite believe that tomorrow it is time for Sheila, Kerys and Ben to head back to the UK. It took a little while to adjust to the influx of people in the house but I think it will take equally long if not longer to readjust to the emptiness when they've gone! Hopefully they have all enjoyed their taste of Italy and will be back soon.