Just one flower at the campsite
 

First, we had to push our bikes up the steep gravel road. Fortunately, the day started with a descent and remained reasonably flat. In the first village passed, we bought food, a huge white bread without any taste or salt that would take us four days to finish. The stores were all without signs or even windows, so they were impossible to find without asking around. All old people in the village drove around in small three-wheeled cars with a trunk. Realistically there was only place for one person in the front, but typically two people were sitting there. The vehicles were Piaggios with a scooter engine. The day before we had also seen a couple.

The route passed via Siena to Florence. Until Siena, the road would be flat, then it would be another 50 km. About 10 km before Siena, we overtook a man dragging a cart behind his bike with a microwave in it. He lived in Siena and told us there were two roads to Florence. The first was nice and hilly, the other shorter, flatter, and more ugly. We chose the hilly road. Because we hadn't planned to cycle here, today's route was not in my GPS. Upon leaving Siena, we noticed a sign 'Florence 75'. It turned out we hadn't added all the distances correctly, and it indeed was still 75 instead of 50 km.

We didn't know the exact directions for the hilly route and still ended up on the larger road. The signs next to the road were completely off. First, it said 75 km, and then a few kilometers later 55 km. Repeatedly the same distance was indicated on signs several kilometers apart. Unfortunately, the distance seemed to get increasingly larger.