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Wednesday, September 18th We headed out to Cortona and our first stop of the day. What a beautiful town on the mountain, and it was very busy with tourist and not a place to park. We ended up 1/2 way down the mountain and started walking up. After a couple of miles we saw the sign for the Sanctuary and as we rounded the corner we realized that it wasn’t in the town but further up the mountain.
We went back for the car and made it to the shrine 15 minutes before they would close for lunch. It was enough time as we got to pray view the body of Saint Margaret of Cortona and leave some of your intentions.
Nine miles away was our next destination, Our Lady of the Bath. We knew it would not be open, but we wanted to see the shrine which is outside the church were Our Lady appeared and get water from the Miraculous spring. The ride was beautiful and very hairy at the same time because the road was so narrow, room barely for one car. They call this place the “Valley of God” and we could see why when we arrived. We were the only ones there and accomplished our mission as well a spending a little time to pray.
Our next stop was in Arezzo, not a real big town but a traffic nightmare, narrow streets and lots of traffic as well as no parking and all the streets leading to the cathedral were blocked off or reversed one ways. Tired and frustrated we decided to go to our next B&B, hoping that we wouldn’t have another repeat.
It is a beautiful farm house outside Siena, with a 
guest building. We had booked the largest room which turned out to be a townhouse. The owner was a gracious women and met us and gave us a tour of our place with great pride. Everything we needed and more, fresh eggs and pastries and juice,milk and coffee for the morning as well as other stuff. Relieved and hungry we decided to go out and bring dinner home. We found a small supermarket with prepared foods and loaded up with supplies. While dinner was warming I discovered the missing trip report and prepared to write it again.
We had dinner…you can see it laid out here……. and and then worked on this report until 11. It was then we discovered the missing e-mails from our list (we have been trying to send emails to our many friends around the country, but somehow things got messed up) and knew it would take a couple of hours to rectify. I blamed the hotel from hell that we stayed in the night before and went to bed.
We will fix it tomorrow.
God bless you all.
Susan and Tom
