Venice

Our drive to Venice had us stopping through a few towns along the way, originally we had 3 towns to break up the drive, but we forgot one so we ended up doing a huge drive one day, oops. If it wasn’t so cold we would have visited the surprising town of Montagnana because it was a walled town. The largest factor for us skipping our visit though was that we have been to well over a dozen walled towns. The town was surprising because we had seen nothing like it so far in Italy. Punta Sabioni was our campsite for two days while we visited Venice. In summer this place would have been packed so we were thankful for visiting out of season. The ferry ride was 13 euros each for a 12 hour pass. It dropped us off near the main square, Piazza San Marco. Carnival was on and our first sight of this was the theme park area set up along the Grand Canal heading away from the Piazza San Marco. As soon as you got off the ferry there were about a dozen stands selling the famous “Carnival masks”. We perused these for awhile before walking along the Grand Canal to the tourist office. Our first taste of Venice was nice and it continued to be so, but the most regrettable thing is that everything costs. During our walk there were artists trying to sell pictures or offering portraits, there were also many offering face painting traditional with Carnival. The tourist office didn’t have much of anything useful except that it sold tickets to a play that told the history of Venice. That would have been cool to go to see, but 50 euros each is a little steep. We wandered the many streets with numerous shops selling just about everything but almost all sold masks. There were so many tourists here that you didn’t really need a map because you could just follow the crowd to find some new and interesting area. We went to a small pizza shop for calzones, at 4.50 they were the cheapest. They were good, but Gino’s makes them bigger and better. We spent a fair amount of time taking photos of the people fully dressed up for the parties (most wandered around posing for photos). We found Venice so nice that we definitely want to come back, hopefully for Carnival. We didn’t attended one of the “parties” because they were 80 euros each to attend and require advance booking.