Pescina (33 days into our holiday)

Lang’s short tailed blue in our butterfly meadow and Karen relaxing in a hot spring

We are immediately surrounded by some brilliant butterfly meadows which are still swarming with insects at this late time of the year.  The one drawback of where we are living is that it is very hilly.  Living on a boat means that Karen is able to run on flat ground; not so here, but full marks to her for persisting and doing it.

As I said the other day, our cottage is just over 3,000’ up a mountainside.  What we hadn’t realised was that the mountain (Monte Amiato) is actually a small ski resort in the winter so we have now added something else to our list of things to do while we are here.  We obviously won’t be skiing but we will attempt to get to the top one day.

Our breakfast view

Showing you our breakfast view brings to mind another drawback – there are several cats around here, so it means Buddy has to be kept tied up when we are around the house otherwise mayhem would ensue.

Buddy’s breakfast view - constantly looking for cats (must be evening judging by the sun position)

Fortunately, we walk a little way down the track and he can be let off and have a good run in the fields.

Greater banded grayling – so well camouflaged

Our nearest village is a place called Piscina which is just over two miles away.  It doesn’t have any shops but does have a couple of bars so no doubt we will have a wander or two down there, although the steep walk back up will be fun 😉

Castel del Piano is about eight miles away and has a small supermarket, so we popped in on Thursday to get food for a week.  It really wasn’t the sort of place to buy a week’s worth of food so next week we will have to venture to one of the large towns near the coast to get a big shop in a large supermarket. 

We have decided to have a rest day every other and stay at home and then go ‘touristing’ on the other days.   We can still get fresh fruit and veg from grocer shops when we go out, but we don’t count that as supermarket shopping.

When we went into the supermarket at Castel del Piano the town was quiet with just a few old men sitting in the square playing dominos.  What a transformation when we came out.  The square was packed with cars and there were children everywhere; it was obviously the end of the school day and parents had driven in from across the catchment area to collect their offspring.

We spent the rest of the day exploring around the cottage and checking out the butterflies.  One of the more common ones was the Lang’s short tailed blue shown at the top – a rather striking butterfly (well, to us anyway).  There were several species of fritillaries including a Queen of Spain fritillary which don’t live in the UK but very rarely immigrants are seen – about 400 sightings since the first record in 1702.  I was lucky enough to see one eleven years ago in West Sussex.

Tatty Queen of Spain, fresh small heath and a worse for wear sliver washed fritillary

Although fritillaries have the distinctive fritillary markings on the uppersides and tend to look the same other than in size and shape, the undersides are generally all quite different and often used as the distinguishing features.

Butterfly meadow above the house

We’re finding it a bit like the camping trip of the last three weeks or so, not really ready to go out anywhere until early afternoon.  On Friday afternoon we took a trip to the local hot springs at Bagni San Filippo and have to admit they were quite astonishing.  The calcium deposits that have built up on the rock faces looked like torrents of water were rushing down.  Water was coming down but just spread out across the surface and all the pools were really quite warm. 

We couldn’t help thinking how this sort of attraction would be protected in the UK as people walking on the deposits must wear them away quicker than they build up.

What looks like torrents of water is really calcium deposits with a thin film of water flowing over them

Buddy wouldn’t go near the water.  We really have freaked him out since we went swimming in lakes in France ☹

Buddy anxiously watching me walking up to a hot pool (and that's not our pile of clothes)

The whole river valley was full of pools that had been manmade by building dams across the river.

Two of the manmade pools

Many people were caking each other in the mud from the bottom of the pools and the smell of sulphur in the air was quite pungent.  So much so that when we left we needed to pop into a bar for a refresher before driving home.

Walking through Bagni San Filippo looking for a bar in the sulphur-laden air

On the drive home we popped into a pharmacy, in a village called Altori, to pick up some antihistamine tablets.  Even though it seemed to be a small village, the pharmacy was packed with locals and it was quite surreal.  When it got to our turn, the pharmacist wanted to try out his English which wasn’t very good, and, in the end, we communicated by showing him a text message Matthew had sent Karen with the names of three different drugs.  The pharmacist was particularly interested in my tee-shirt which had the profiles of the three peaks of Wales, England and Scotland.  We still couldn’t communicate but inferred that he was interested in hill walking.

We are aware, from the number of emails we are getting from CRT announcing river closures due to high water levels, that the weather has broken in the UK.  Hopefully, when we get back, it means we will be able to continue cruising through the winter and not be stranded in the water starved Leeds & Liverpool canal at Skipton as we had once feared.