Campeol Hotel Treviso

Day 7, Florence

If Rome and Venice were “aerobic sightseeing,” Florence was a triathlon! Three world-class museums (plus lunch,, Rick Steeves’ “Renaissance Walk” and two harrowing bus rides in and out of town) all in about nine hours!

We started the day with a bus ride into the city center of Venice. (Even though we have a rental car, the city center is what is called locally a “no go zone’” This is a ...

Day Six, Venice to Florence:
Today was a travel day for us: getting out of Venice, picking up a rental care, making our way to Florence by way of Padua.
How we hated to leave Venice! We agree that a month here would just scratch the surface. Around every corner is a new piazza and a new adventure. We will be back!
Michele was intent on seeing the Calatrava bridge before we left Venice. For ...

Blog Day 5 (Venice 2), Wednesday, December 9
We rose well-rested and after enjoying the hotel’s breakfast buffet, set off for St. Mark’s Square, where we spent most of our day. With the national holiday crowds dispersed, it finally paid off to be here in the off season! There were no lines for the Basillica or any of the “extra” (“for a small fee”) attractions on the square. It is no longer allowed to feed the pigeons, with the positive result ...

... All of us girls crashed on the bed and Steve decided to go explore since he didn’t have as long in Venice as we did. We all eventually woke up and took showers, then met Steve to go exploring. Venice is a very beautiful city, though it does smell somewhat like fish but that didn’t bother me. We walked for hours. Winding around the back streets and bridges, trying to see what treasures we ...

... but we decided to stay and investigate the island. We walked and checked out most of the places of and of course a small amount of shopping! After a day of just walking we stopped and had dinner. I had a great meal of spagetti and seafood. There was something in my dish that was a mystery "critter". I did ask ...

... were totally outskiing me. Then I took the train to the "top of Europe" where it was -13 degrees celsius. That's REALLY COLD farenheit. Then I ate fondue ... fondue is AWESOME! How can you not love bread and potatoes dipped in cheese? And they have a cool "apple beer" that is basically cider ... it is very yummy. And it goes well with fondue! Today was an all day train adventure ... witht he exception of an hour waiting for my train in Lucern to ...

... to say, the reason we wanted the fridge so badly is because even if we can just buy milk then we save money by not having to buy breakfast. Also we can buy stuff for rolls for lunch and save leftovers.) and then went to the supermarket here and brought lunch and then went and laid by the pool all afternoon. The pool here is cool, its big and a nice temperature and all around it are lounge chairs. We stayed there for a few hours. Dinner was a bit of a pain due to ...

... Venice. After we walked past him and the 2 guards with AK47 guns and handguns all in their pockets we managed to safely get on the plane. When we got to Venice we went to look for a bus to take us to the hotel. Now this was the first time that i had travelled with unarranged transfers from the airport but knew we would be allright. It then clicked that we had arrived in a country that speaks another language altogether! And neither of us knew any italian. But lucky we could ...

It seems that I have picked up bed bugs enroute to italy, and I have also learned that any nice to italy overnight train needs to be resereved. When we got to venice we found that it was overpriced and hard to find accomomadtions for a 6 person group of people. Luckily we were able to find something for 25 euro a night. After settling in ...

... but after on day of being lost for several hours, we decided not to brave the lovely island again and had a 4-man beach party at the pool and the campsite. We met 6 Newfies and one west-coaster. That was fun. The campgroud was alright, but the showers were the push buttons one. When you pushed it, the water came out for 6 seconds, (we timed it,) and you had to push it constantly. This is all for now, but we'll tell you about Rome in the next update right now!