The missing Venice post

Well, we decided to make the best of the last few days of our adventure, so we zipped south through the alps into Italy and had a lovely day on the city of canals -- Venice.

You should be reading all about it. Unfortunately, Donna and I did about an hour of tag-team writing about our experiences there, and when we went to post it to the blog, it went up in a puff of cybersmoke, never to be seen or read again. Sometimes, I long for my old paper typewriter and bottle of Liquid Paper.

Suffice it to say that the long-gone post was far more interesting and well-thought-out than what follows.

Venice is like Italy: The Theme Park. After a day of walking and boating around, we finally realized what makes it so magical. There are NO cars. Not one. Everything comes into and out of this island city by boat and muscle. There are mailboats, garbageboats with long claw arms that reach out and snatch garbage cans, taxiboats, busboats, constructioncraneboats, piledrivingboats, deliveryboats and of course, the ubiquitous gondolas with their stripe-shirted gondoliers. For the prices the gondoliers charge -- about 80 Euros for an hour ride is their starting negotiating price (right now 1 Euro = $1.33) -- you should definitely get the wide-brimmed ribboned hat, the striped shirt, the short little matador jacket, the singing of O Solo Mio, the dancing and oar-hopping and every other cliche.

Sometimes, though, as soon as the gondolier got a group of riders on board, the traditional costume would be replaced by some mundane sweatshirt or windbreaker. We didn't gondola ride as it seemed a bit silly and embarassing, but we rode all up and down the Grand Canal on the vaporettos, or water buses. We even got an unexpected trip to the next island town over -- Murano -- when we hopped on the wrong water bus.

Because everything must come into the city by train/boat/back or truck/boat/back, prices in Venice are crazy high. Maybe that's why a gondola ride costs so much. For example, a 1.5 liter bottle of water ranged from 1 euro to 2.5 euros depending on whether you got it from a grocery or a tourist shop. That's a lot to drink water, but it costs just as much to get rid of it. A public restroom costs 1 Euro every time you visit. We stopped at a little outside cafe off the main tourist route. Donna had a tiny little dollhouse cup of espresso that was half full, and I had a teeny-weeny half full glass of the house wine. That was around $8 for about 6 ounces of fluid. The rest of the day we ate delicious bread and slices of pizza to save our pennies for the ridiculously expensive gas it took to get back to Germany.

So here we are back in Frankfurt, with one day left before we return to the U.S. We're eager to get home, but sad that this once-in-a-lifetime adventure is ending. We'll certainly continue to post here for a while, as we've got some great pictures to share (it's not always easy to transfer them from an internet cafe) and lots of processing of our experiences left to do.

Paul