Venice, Day 1
There is no easy way to get from the Cinque Terre to Venice. We took one train from La Spezia to Parma, a second train from Parma to Bologna, and a third train from Bologna to Venice.
Once in Venice, it was a 15-minute walk to our place. This was our first foray into hostel living, and my was it an eye-opener. Again, there was no air conditioning, and it was so hot. We hit the buzzer to the place, and when we were buzzed in and walked in the ground floor we saw this scene. I had no idea what we were getting into and was pretty nervous. After walking up four flights of stairs with all our luggage, we finally got to the hostel. There were five rooms for guests, and ours had two double beds, one twin bed, and a table. There were two bathrooms for the hostel, both with questionable toilets, and only one had a working shower. We are only here for two nights, so again, we will make it work, but the no air conditioning has been a killer, particularly when we are not used to this heat. It’s all part of the adventure, and what you do when you are trying to travel inexpensively.
Walking through Venice was such an adventure. The GPS doesn’t really work in the winding alleys and sometimes would jump us all around so I would have no idea where we were. A couple of times we got turned around and ended up in a dead end or at a canal entrance without a bridge. The kids thought it was so cool that there were no real roads, only canals. I have never experienced a place like this, and sometimes the alleys were so narrow that only one person could fit.
We took the vaporetto (water bus) down the grand canal. This let us see Venice from the river and we even went under the Rialto bridge.
From the canal we walked to the Libreria Acqua Alta, a bookstore with lots of cats, which the kids loved! The books are stacked everywhere—in canoes, gondolas, even bathtubs! There is even a stairway made of books. The bookstore is right on the water, so everything is stacked up in case of floods. We made our way back toward the grand canal, taking our time to look through all the shops. Venice has definitely had some of the best tourist shops with lots of masks and glass. Most of the shops have similar things, but it seems they try to outdo each other with the window displays.
We took the vaporetto back toward our house, and this was the latest we had been out so far on our trip. It was just too hot to get back to the room before night. The vaporetto ride at night was great; we could see all the lights reflecting off the water.
