Trip to Venice

Up the Adriatico yesterday to Venice actually just beside Venice, Mestre....he who shall not be named...(Rick Steve, American travel book writer that I have quoted too much this trip and who has proven to be right more than Marco, is now a banned name in our vocabulary, like Voldemort, we cannot speak of Rick without Marco cringing...) so anyhow, RS says don't stay in Mestre except to park, but we have a car and so staying in Venice was more than we could handle lugging all our stuff in the vaporetto (water taxi)...so we stayed in Mestre...the first bad hotel experience of the trip. We had not pre-booked hotels so we could travel at will...we tried to go for quaint...now mind you everyone else thought the hotel was fine...I thought Scooby-Doo...(American cartoon) and expected the scary music to start any minute and the luggage to disappear.

The trip up Pescara, straight up along the green beautiful Adriatic to Ancona, Pesaro, Rimini (super beautiful vacation spot) then we cut over to Bologna and then up to Padua then Mestre. We made it thru the night, no one disappeared...when I asked the hotelier last night for a map of Europe as we are heading to Paris thru Switzerland...he said Map (he spoke english) I don't have no map...wait until 11:30pm my colleague, he knows everything...and he went back to reading his book, clearly not succumbing to the Karen Burke charm...

Off to get the water taxi and go to the cafe recomended by my uncle OJ!

Hugs - KB