Italy road Trip part 4 - Seeing our hard work pay off

Today was going to be a weird day. Adam had a phone conference for most of the day so we decided to get out of his hair for a little while so he could concentrate. The 4 of us headed into Passignano to try and find a wireless cafe. After parking and finding nothing we went to the train station for better luck. It was a single room with a bar and a couple casino machines. Then there were also a couple computers you could use..but that's about it.

About an hour and a half later we head back to the parking lot only to realize we were blocked in. We had one glimmer of hope, there was a large break between a car and a tree that we thought we could get our SUV through. We were almost through and just had a problem with a few inches and our bumper. Then an older italian gentleman walked over and told us to pick up the little car and move it. I thought this was a joke. Then he directed all of us to sections of the little fiat looking car and we picked up the end of that car and moved it a good foot. We were in the clear and laughing our butts off that we just picked up and moved a car in italy!!

Adam was still on his phone call when we got back so we had to head to the olive mill press with out him. Wolfgang led the caravan to the mill where we would press our olives and see our olive oil. We watched all the machines work from dumping in to sucking twigs and leaves to washing and then the cold pressing. We also saw the brown gunk and water extrapolated out and the pure green oil come out.

These are our olives and the next picture is Wolfgang throwing the baskets into the bin.

This is phase one, the big basket above is dumped into the blue bin

Phase 2, the twigs and leaves are sucked out through the bottom of the bin

Then the olives go up through the yellow tube and are cleaned

You can see all the guck coming off of the olives

The olives are pressed and the first round of pulp and leftover olive bits are contained in this pan

Then all thats left is the bright green olive oil, pure and organic

We headed back to the apartment to clean up and get Adam. Then we headed to Castiglione del Lago for dinner that night. We were told of a great pizza place there at the Cantina Pizzeria. The pizza's were fantastic and of course dinner wouldn't be complete with Adam not getting something weird...Wild Boar. It was pretty tasty though.

The lovely pizza oven

the sleepy town

My pizza mushroom and ham...delicious

Adam's dinner Wild Boar...also delicious!

The town was pretty quite, it was also up on a hill and pretty much closed down in the low tourist season. So we walked from one end to the other and froze, then drove back to our apartment for our fabulous fireplace and books.