Continued from Siena 2026 Day 2 Part 2.

Must have coffee, will be a slow morning of lounging around here until lunch time.

I don’t remember why I’m back in bed after getting up earlier, but here’s the kids being crazy.

The 17 contradas of Siena and their animals.

Alright, let’s head out. We are going to head in a different direction up to Siena and not take the escalator. RL said that she walked down the hill the other day and it’s not a bad walk at all. Yeah…she walked down it, but we need to walk up it right now. Let’s see how that works out.

What’s this?

Oh look, there’s koi fish in it. What do they eat? Does someone feed them regularly?

Public water fountain.

LKL asked what this thing is? I don’t know, some sort of sculpture?

And now we go uphill. Yeah…it’s a lot of uphill.

I guess at least this is a good workout for us.

Even has a duck stuffy inside. Now that I’m looking at this, maybe this is the duck contrada area?

I see these all over town. I guess these is where you used to tie horses?

Alright, what I wanted to see on this side of town is just up ahead.

There it is, the oldest bank in the world, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. I randomly read about this bank in the news only a few weeks ago in the news and realized that I could go visit it while I’m in Siena.

Not impressed by the oldest bank in the world. In fact, no one was impressed by it except for me…

Come on kids, it’s the oldest bank in the world? Pretty cool eh? No? Alright, fine. We can go get some lunch now. I’m also wearing the souvenir that I got from Ferrari gift shop, the most un-Ferrari gear I could find there, a black bucket hat with a teeny tiny logo on the front.

Now we walk partially down the long hill to find our lunch spot.

Oh look, a public drinking fountain.

I don’t remember who suggested it, maybe PL, but here I am holding LKL upside down for him to drink the water.

Of course, too good of an opportunity to miss spraying his face with some water. Haha, we all had a good laugh, and he did as well.

Lunch spot. Except they didn’t have any table for 5. So on to the next option.

Beautiful setting here in Siena. This place was just around the corner from the place we tried first.

In order to fit the 5 of us, one person needs to sit in the little cubby against the wall. I thought it’s a pretty cool spot to sit.

I really like this beer. My tummy seems to do really well with it as well. Speaking of which, my tummy has been pretty happy on this trip so far. Should go look to buy some Menabrea back in Austin.

They had a tasting menu here along with wine pairing, RL and I aren’t wine drinkers, but let’s do it! We are in Tuscany, might as well have some wine. The wines are pretty darn good here for sure.

He’s crazy, we made him do some jumping jacks to get some energy out. He also wasn’t a fan of sitting in the cubby, so we got PL to switch seats with him.

She wanted to know what the wine tasted like, so we gave her a taste.

Second wine. Our waitress opened it and just left the whole bottle on the table for us to pour as we pleased. Wait what…ok I guess.

Cheers to more wine than we can drink. Pretty sure we were tipsy by this point.

Kids shared all 3 plates and we’d rotate the plates every 5minutes or so.

Crazies can’t sit still.

Next bottle.

More food than we can eat. This turned out to be a pretty nice fancy meal, and we had a lot of fun trying everything along with the wine pairing. I guess I can check wine tasting off of the list for things to do in Tuscany.

Kids, if you have so much energy still, go run up and down the hill.

Please don’t fall running down the hills…please don’t.

I told the girls to catch LKL and tickle him and tell him that it’s from me. Haha.

Passed by the water fountain on the way home again. Let’s have a redo of earlier.

I made sure to get it all over his face this time. Good times.

We were all amused, even LKL himself.

It’s much easier walking down this long hill than walking up.

Back close to airbnb by the water fountain.

LKL points. Look! Coins!

Others had thrown coins inside the fountain already, so the kids wanted to do the same. RL dug out some pennies from her fanny pack…wait…she’s been carrying pennies around this whole time?

I hope they had wished for more obedient behavior from themselves.

It’s nap time for the parents, kids, yall can watch a show together on the ipad.

We woke up from our nap late afternoon to sounds of drumming. Looked outside our window and saw these teenagers with a drum and flags. I think they are practicing in preparation for the Palio in a few days.

Took the escalators up the hill. The kids all wanted to go run around in the main plaza again. Sure, let’s do that, get some energy out.

Is this just from people banging them back and forth or is it actually wear over the years? Windy days?

But first, before we run around, we had promised them gelatos.

Nom nom nom.

There’s a bit more people here today, but still not bad. Love Siena.

Kids playing tag/hide and seek. CL using her brown shirt and camouflage and hiding being other people. She would run up to big groups of people, hide behind them and just squat down to make herself smaller. I wonder what those people think? Hah.

She was having trouble catching PL, so I told her if she can’t outrun PL, use her guile to catch PL. She snuck around, hid behind people, and eventually caught PL offguard. Nice. You can see CL sneaking up behind PL in the distance.

He said he has the perfect outfit for the day since he’s so visible….don’t you mean the worst one if you are trying to hide from your siblings?

They caught him and are now tickling him.

Alright, that’s enough playing around. Let’s leave now and get some more food at the grocery store to eat at home.

RL wanted to go into this pottery store we walked past.

Good ol’ deli counter at the grocery store. We are heading to Florence tomorrow, so we are going to have a chill meal at home and start packing back up.

Doh. Fortunately, only one was broken.

I chuckled.

We really enjoyed our wine pairing at lunch today, so we bought a bottle as a gift for our airbnb host. I had messaged the host regarding our issues getting a taxi or an uber to fit all of us. He offered to come by with his father in law in two cars to take us to the train station tomorrow. How awesome is that? He won’t take payment so we figured we’d buy him a bottle of wine as a thanks. We know nothing about wines, so I hope what we think is a decent wine is actually not terrible.

The kids asked me to serve them dinner buffet style. OK then, here it is, buffet style.

To be continued at Florence 2026 Day 1.