Friday, July 11, 2008

Ah....Venice.

After yesterdays venting about hotel rooms in Florence, let me just say the place in Venice is a gem. We have a view out our window overlooking a canal. Not the Grand Canal or anything silly like that. Still, its a canal. This morning, gondalliers sang as the sailed past our window. That is pretty all right in my books.

Most of the travel guides say you will get lost in Venice. If you are like me, you take that with a bit of a grain of salt, figuring you will be the exception. Besides, I am good with maps and have a good sense of direction.

All of which is completely useless. We have been lost more often than we have been found. And here is the crazy part...Cathy is much better at navigating around Venice than I am.

This is not meant to besmearch my lovely wife and her intelligence. She will be the first to admit she has a terrible sense of direction. I could put her in a square at 7 pm at night and ask her which way is west and she would not know.

But she tends to compensate for problems in weird leaps of logic. And if there was ever a place made for weird leaps of logic, its Venice. The place works best, it seems, if you abandon all hope of things making sense. Which is, well, what works well for Cathy.

(she is looking over my shoulder as I type this and nodding her head).

But we are loving the place. It is much more than we expected. Not as dirty as Florence was. And every corner is a postcard. We have been happy just to wander and window shop, rather than hitting museums and churches (although we hit the one in St. Marco today). It is a great city once you wander off the beaten path, which is never more than one or two wrong turns away.

Off to Murano and some of the outlying islands tomorrow. More updates when I can afford it.

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