Six of us went for a five-day bikepacking gravel cycling trip in Tuscany. The tour started and ended in Siena.

Day	Start	Distance	Elevation gain	On paved road	Route
1	Siena	100 km	1901 m	39%	Day 1
2	Castiglione d'Orcia	96 km	1589 m	54%	Day 2
3	Bagni San Filippo	88 km	1667 m	83%	Day 3
4	Bagni di Petriolo	68 km	1275 m	26%	Day 4
5	Asciano	92 km	1693 m	63%	Day 5
Total		444 km	8125 m

Sunday

We aim to start at 7 am from Lausanne. We have two cars with three cyclist each and four bikes in total plus luggage. Riccardo and I plan to rent bikes in Siena, the others bring their own bikes.

Kees brings Mr Ride, an old mountain bike, from the Netherlands but during a Mollendruz-Marchariuz prologue the day before, he decides against using it for the trip. Riccardo orders an emergency Bianchi for him. This makes three of us renting gravel bikes in Siena. The others use their endurance road bike with 32 mm tyres.

I buy bread and pastry for the group at Chez Manu, a bakery nearby where I used to live. We finish loading the cars and we start our 700km drive towards Siena.

Monday

We walk to the Siena Bike Shop to pick-up our gravel bikes. They rent us three Bianchis with 40mm gravel tyres. It takes an hour to set everything up: the mechanic mounts our pedals, we adjust the seat height and install our bike bags.

We leave the cars in the parking garage of the Siena train station where the parking costs only 2€ per day.

We start pedalling around eleven. We get excited on the first gravel sectors. The bikes roll well on the dry, compacted white roads.

At about halfway we have lunch on a beautiful terrace in Murlo.

Some french tourist ask for the Gladiator House which we miss. Martijn has a flat which he quickly repairs.

Before the last climb of the day we stop in Bagno Vignoni.

Riccardo and I do the proper path with 15-20% bits.

Dinner in a family restaurant.