If you’re new here, I’ve been sharing photos of my honeymoon in Italy until the wedding ’season’ starts up again. This blog is fairly new so there are a couple of engagement shoots up, otherwise my best wedding work is on the main site
Despite having Venice as our next destination, leaving cinque terre was not something we wanted to do in any hurry. Naturally I took a few more photos from our balcony, hoping one last time to capture the feeling of being there.
Now imagine our surprise (and disappointment) when, halfway to Venice, we realized that we’d somehow skipped a night of accommodations! Not only did that mean we could’ve stayed in cinque terre for one more night – we didn’t have a place to stay once we got to Venice!
Once we got there, we called the place we’d be staying at the next night to see if we could get in early – no luck – but she referred us to one other place she knew of, so Leah called right away. Figures – the woman on the other end of the phone only spoke italian! Full marks go to Leah though for sticking it out and figuring out where the place was, and that they did have a room free for a decent price (right before we ran out of change to feed the pay phone – thank you pocket translation book!). We finally got to the place but there was no one there, just a phone number and a map to the restaurant where they could be found. sigh… long story short – most of our first day in Venice was spent waiting around with our bags for someone to come check us in. It turned out to be an amazing room, but all we really had time to do was walk around a bit and grab dinner, so I’m compressing two days of the trip into this one post.
The next morning, we checked out and checked in to the place we were supposed to be staying in and headed out to explore. First stop: ponte Vecchio.
and the many many jewelry shops lining the bridge, most featuring hand-made murano glass.
The gondolas – does anyone go to Venice without riding them? yeah – us. At 100 euros for less than an hour, we felt like we could skip it. What we didn’t spend on the ride, we spent on jewelry and gifts. Good trade off I’d say – Leah would agree.
We settled on seeing Venice from the grand canal by waterbus rather than gondola. We headed to St. Mark’s square where the pigeons are apparently as much of an attraction as anything that was built there.
We walked back and explored Venice quite thoroughly I have to say. We walked by a lot of the designer shops there and concluded that just about everything in Venice is expensive. We had dinner in a plaza lined with restaurants and walked around some more. Venice at night is quite a bustling place, and the view over the grand canal is so nice with all the lights reflecting off of the water.
mike
by mike
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