Goodbye Venice

Off to Piazza San Marco

We slept well, ate a bite and headed off: first getting off the ship, then walking to the People Mover (1.5 euros per person for ¼ mile ride), then to water bus and enjoying the views and the Italians and scads of tourists until we reached the stop for the Piazza. We had texted Lisa so soon enough she arrived and we were off to the Doge’s Palace. Us and at least a million other people mostly high school students from everywhere. It took a while to get the tickets and then our acoustaguide which was a god send.

The Doge’s Palace is enormous. It is impossible to describe the ceilings with their original art work, gold filigree and so much more I cannot describe adequately. One room larger than the other. But boy what a vicious bunch they were making accusations willy nilly (there was a special marble mailbox where you put your denunciations and then the poor victim had to defend himself. Sounds like our current administration.

Eventually we came to the awful prisons, considerably cleaned up for our visit. And they went on and on and they said there wasn’t enough room for the prisoners! One did manage to escape though I can’t iagine how.

Lunch

This was over 2 hrs of gawking and craning our necks. For the total day, Ed says we walked more than 9,000 steps. So we found a place to eat. We weren’t choosy but found a small restaurant and each of us ordered a salad. As Ed was paying the check, a group of kids from Connecticut were trying to decide what to eat. I told them we had a good meal there. They asked what we had. When I said salad you could see they weren’t impressed. So I pointed to this H U G E pizza in the window and asked them how they could go wrong with that. So since there was enough room for them, they decided to try it. The guy at the door said I was doing his job for him.

We picked up Lisa’s bag from the hotel and began our walks through the narrow streets of Venice with the grand idea of picking up our boat at the rialto bridge. We were running out of time so we defaulted to the known and picked up the water bus at the same stop where we left it and retraced our steps to the ship. We made it with 15 min to spare. Things take so much longer there.

Sail Away

We invited several people to join us on the front of the ship for the sail away. It was fun with Lisa being the subtle great hostess she always is. We had fun discussing various things about Venice: Lisa and Rick found so many leaning towers it became a fun sport to find one that looked straight up. We talked about things we still wanted to see or do in Venice and Rick said that’s a good excuse to return.

Dinner

It was open seating and so we joined Frances and Randy at our usual site with Francis and Peter. We had fun as usual. The entertainment tonight was a movie but we didn’t finish dinner until after 9 with all the excitement and we have an early tour tomorrow so it is an early evening for us.