A Venetian Dream

Venice truly is something out of a dream. We stayed near the beaches of Lido at Camping Miramare and caught the ferry in to Venice for the last two days. Being in Rome and walking through the forum gave the impression of being teleported to another place in time, whereas traveling to Venice really does take you back several centuries. Our arrival near piazza San Marco was like being thrust into a crowded Parisian subway car, or dropped in the middle of Disneyland on a Saturday. The number of people in a place that was designed with so little solid ground for walking made it hard to get a handle on the beauty of the city, at least at first. We walked through St Mark's square and Philly and I were pretty grossed out by all the people spreading food on themselves and having the pigeons fly up on them to eat it off. We were going to stop and have a drink in the main area but there was a large cover charge for the live music so we kept wandering. Philly was shooting a video and I was looking at the map to try to decide which way to wander when she started freaking out and waving her hands up and down. I tried to figure out what had happened, and she finally spit out..."that bird shat on me". Sure enough the offending pigeon managed to hit her hair and her shirt. It was hilarious and fortunately she was filming so we can throw it on utube and share it with the world. That was our cue to ditch the main drag and head for some back alleys. We took a ton of pictures and spent time imagining life in the 1300's. I finally found a place to get my haircut and even though he cut it a lot shorter then I told him to, he proudly spun me around in the chair and pronounced that I now had "very popular Italian hair cut" and slapped in more mousse than I thought possible. On our second day we decided to see the city as it was meant to be seen, by water of course. We just hopped the different Vaporetti, water buses, until we had seen most of the city and were ready to head home. We had some great artichoke, ham, and mushroom pizza as well as bellini's as we waited for our ferry. After we got back to the mainland we saw some really cool lightning set against an orange sky. Just before bed we heard some explosions that sounded more regulated than the earlier thunder and we noticed a lot of fireworks coming from down the beach. Maybe another holiday we didn't know about or something, but there were at least ten different locations shooting off synchronized shows, so we stayed up and watched from the top bunk of the camper. Tomorrow we set off for the Interlaken area in Switzerland.