Tuscany Day 1

Images: Our pet - "Scorpio"; Our Tuscan House; The Patio; View from the Back of the Patio
Here in Tuscany, dogs do not get laryngitis, birds do not need alarm clocks, and scorpions are not just in your daily horoscope.
The first thing that we did right was to plan our travel, our stops and our shopping so that we arrived in Santa Fiora with a load of groceries but with plenty of daylight left to search for the key to #8 Chiassi del Borgo, which was hidden “under a rock in the flowerbed to the right of the door.” Problem being that there was no flower bed, no flowers, no garden to the right of the door. The whole patio was made of rocks. SL finally looked under a rock and found the key, then proceeded to enter the house to find.... a scorpion.
Emerging from the bathroom she requested that I confirm that there in the bathtub was a real live scorpion. With my vastly superior experience of dealing with scorpions in Burlington Ontario, I confirmed that it looked exactly like every picture of a scorpion I had ever seen. After I had dispatched Scorpio back to its constellation, we decided to wear slippers everywhere in the house.
Marcello, our neighbour, runs a kennel next door, but lives in town. His 23 dogs bark, taking turns rather like a relay race if one of them loses heart. At the moment, there is at least a quintet in full voice. They bark in the day. They bark at night. They bark in the morning. They bark at 3:47 in the morning. They bark.... you get the picture.
Funny thing is, scorpions, dogs, spiders, snakes (there are poisonous vipers in the fields) – we love it here.
You get used to the dogs, and kind of miss them when they take a union break. The blend in with the sound of the songbirds, the gurgle of the water that flows from the fountain in our back yard, the rush of the river below. The smell of the air is unbelievable.
The scenery is storybook pretty; we are near Monte Amiata, the highest mountain in Tuscany, and the villages, towns, stone cottages are centuries old.
Tomorrow we explore Abbadia San Salvatore and Radicofani. I plan to BBQ a Bistecca Fiorentina tomorrow night!