Riva Del Garda - Venice

Today we drove out of Riva Del Garda and down to Venice.  Keeping to our early morning starts we arrived at our hotel at 12 noon and caught the bus into town.  

More than one way to skin a cat.
Cop that Novotel

We decided to stay overnight just outside of Venice rather than drive off to our next accommodation in the evening.  Trying to book a hotel room with 5 people is a nightmare as they will only let you book 2 rooms if you have 5 people.  (I told Nicki we should have left Ryan at home.)  


At €120 a room we wanted to avoid that scenario so we booked over the internet for 4 people only and smuggled Ryan in.  It was like a James Bond movie moving the family into the room in separate stages and past the security cameras. 

Venice was great and I set the GPS on my phone and away we went.    These phones are great because Venice is a maze of streets going every which way and with the phone showing us where we were we only got lost the once.  

Venice - a jogging nightmare

Did the major sites of course seeing St Marks Basilica, the Rialto Bridge and the gondolas all about the place.  It was €80 for a 40 minute ride in gondola so we gave that a swerve.  (More if you wanted singing and a piano accordian accompaniment.) 

After hearing tourist nightmares about Venice I was surprised at how cheap Venice was providing you didn't want to sit in St Marks square.  Pizzas, meals, drinks and beers were all quite reasonable and only slightly more expensive than on the mainland. 

Success - retrieval of the gondola

Ryan bought a souvenir gondola for €3 and promptly dropped it in a canal where it floated away on the outgoing tide.  Being a good Dad I bolted off into the labyrinth of streets to try and intercept it further down the canal.  After running into several dead ends I popped out of a street on the canal and promptly slipped on the steps and nearly ended up in the canal myself.  That would have been great.  Trash a $400 phone to save $4 toy gondola. 


Walked about some more and then caught the bus back home.  I checked my GPS tracker and saw that by the end of the day we'd walked over 11kms.

Stray observations.  There is a surprising amount of room in a suitcase.

Venice from the Rialto bridge.

A bridge somewhere.