a night in venizia

We posted this morning about our Plzen expedition and following that we were off to Venice. That consisted of waking up at about 5am to be packed and out the door by 6 to catch the Metro and then a bus to the Prague airport. The airport was pretty quiet and we were checked in, on board and off in no time. No delays at the gate which was pretty surprising considering we had spent 2 hours sitting at the gate in JFK. EasyJet was a great little airline and we made it in about 20 minutes early to the Milan airport and caught the bus to the main train station. This took a little longer than expected, but it was okay because we had plenty of time to wait for the train. We decided that though we would have liked to explore Milan while we waited that without being able to find a locker we did not want to pack our things around the city.

The train ride was beautiful and we saw the coastline for part of the way. Andi slept most of the way and Curtis just enjoyed the scenary. We arrived at the Mestre train station where we got off a stop early as we are staying in a hotel just outside of the island. There is a cosway to get to Venice and our hotel has a shuttle that we can book for a few dollars to take us there and pick us up, so we caught one of the craziest buses we have ever been on to our hotel-Villa Dori. The Italian buses do not have the stops posted near the stop, on the bus, nor do they announce the next stops to come! We knew ours was the 2nd to last stop, but did not know when that would be. Finally another American kid on the bus asked if we were as confused as he was. We showed him the map that Curtis had printed off and it gave us a good idea of where we were at. The bus ended up stopping right in front of the hotel, otherwise we probably would have been completely lost.

Our room was really nice, everything done in the Italian style. We have a huge bathroom and even have a beday! (I may have spelled that wrong). We scheduled to take the shuttle into Venice and see it at night from 8pm to Midnight. It was a long night of walking around the twisting, turning streets. We decided to chuck the map as most people do and just wander. Since it is an island and there are some main sites that there are always signs for we decided to just get our bearings by following the signs. It was pretty fun. We grabbed some real Italian pizza from a street vendor and sat on the side of the canal to eat. Then of course we could not miss out on the GELATO! (Icecream!) Yes, it is THAT good! We really liked it and decided we would have to have it at least twice more the next day (today).

It was pretty humid and after a while of walking around we decided to head back and wait for the shuttle and rest our tired feet. It was a good trip to Venice and we were ready for bed.

C&A