Venice, Italy

Our approach to travel has been to make all our own reservations so we can go with our own pace, our own interests, and avoid the crowd.  It has it's good and bad aspects.  Kind of a neat challenge to arrive in the Venice, Italy, on a Portuguese airline (TAP) and go through customs, collect checked bags, investigate ground transportation options, buy tickets (currency exchange), and find your way through the crowd to the proper water taxi pick up point, then make sure you get off at the right stop. Our B&B is on a one-block long alley, and Venice is a maze of alleys and canals; we had to follow directions carefully to find our way here. We make mistakes, but it also forces us to learn more about our surroundings: customs, language, costs, sign terminology. Dawn and I have different approaches, by comparing our information, our success rate is increased.

 The green shutters just above the doorway are to our room in the B&B.  Quite modern inside and the breakfast was excellent.

A gondola traffic jam: these narrow canals are the streets of Venice.

The Grand Canal as seen from the Rialto bridge.  Venice is an island connected to the mainland by a causeway.  From the airport we took a water taxi to our accommodations.

The water taxis in Venice are beautiful; note that the nearby wharf is under water due to the periodic high tides.

The many tourists in Piazza San Marco are wading in foot-deep water from the high tide.

Some shop owners let the high tides flow on in to their stores, but this shop has a waterproof divider to keep the seas out.

Pretty neat bit of sculpture on the Grand Canal.

This is every day life in Venice: gobs of tourists, and those slender, non-symmetrical, single-oar boats plying the maze of canals.

It's mid-September and the crowds here are amazing. Obtaining a good accommodation reservation only four months in advance was difficult.  We have been to Venice before, but we were so impressed on our first visit, we needed to see more. It must have been high tide when we went exploring today; the water was a foot deep in many popular plazas and walkways. We took off our shoes and went barefoot. Some merchants just let the water flow into their shops; others had installed waterproof "dikes" at the doorway to keep the water out. Exactly two years ago, we were walking barefoot on the streets of Trieste, Italy, but then it was due to torrential rain.

We have traveled eight time zones away from Colorado.  This morning I had two cups of coffee to perk me up, and we have been going all day.  We hope to get up early tomorrow to beat the crowd to some scenic spots.
(later) Can you believe that Dawn woke me up at 0430 this morning to "beat the crowd"?  But the sun doesn't come up until 0645!  She wanted to get sunrise photos without tourists.  I love her enthusiasm, even if I wasn't eager to get up so early. We got those photos at sunrise, then came back to our B&B, had breakfast, and took a nap. We are spending hours wandering this maze of a city; lots of art and fashion shops. I love admiring the endless parade of speedboats carrying tourists through the canals. Churches and museums abound; Venice was a very big deal centuries ago, a "city state" with international power.