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| Birthday Boy |
The only place in Europe that is actually LESS crowded now than it was at the end of February is Venice, Italy, and that's because Carnivale is long over. We went to Venice because that was the departure point for Tom and Sue, who were headed to Naples, and that departure point had two benefits: it allowed them to get a direct flight and it let my dad see a bit of Venice.
Our car rental company was supposed to have secured a seven-passenger SUV-type vehicle for us, but they failed and we ended up with a 9-seat bench-style, manual transmission passenger van with a plastic floor and a luggage storage area the size of a walk-in closet -- exactly the kind of vehicle used by airport shuttle services and sightseeing tour companies. Luckily, we weren't planning to be on any narrow serpentine roads; we just needed to get from Rijeka to Marco Polo airport and back. I have a feeling that when I get home and sit in the drivers seat of my Honda minivan, it's going to feel as if I'm driving that 9-seat passenger van -- we've grown very used to small cars with manual transmissions.
While Adam was driving this massive vehicle to our apartment, we sang Happy Birthday to Jonah over three chocolate napoleons that we picked up at the grocery store in the morning. One of the napoleons had 9 candles sticking out of it, and Jonah blew them all out in one breath. Together, Adam and I have celebrated 19 kid birthdays. This was the first kid birthday ever that I didn't have to make a cake, and truthfully, I kind of missed it.
After the birthday lunch and the 3 hour drive to Venice, we found our way from the Marco Polo airport (dropping off my parents' bags at the luggage storage at the airport) to the Arsenale stop by water bus. From there, our hotel, Nuovo Tesson, was just a few minutes away. While Adam did a little bit of work, we took a short walk around our neighborhood and scored birthday gelato for Jonah. It was there that Lucy made the comment, "you can't judge a gelato by its color", which I think is a brilliant comment on so many levels.
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| San Marco Piazza |
We walked back to the hotel to pick up Adam, and started to find our way to the Campo San Margharita, which was the location of a pizzeria that came highly recommended. Our route took us through San Marco's Piazza, where for a long time, the children attempted to get the pigeons to eat out directly of their hands, up to and over the Academy Bridge, up and across dozens of smaller canals and bridges, until two hours later, we finally stumbled into Ai Sportivi, famished, thirsty, and exhausted... it was the pizzeria we were aiming for.
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| Ai Sportivi, Venice |
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| Nine fingers, Venice |
You just can't imagine how delicious a liter of Italian red wine tastes after driving for three hours in a 9 passenger van, and trying to stay unlost for two hours on the narrow streets of Venice with a poor-quality map and three starving children (while trying to observe a birthday). But the restaurant lived up to its billing. The pizza was top notch for northern Italy. There aren't a lot of wood-burning pizza ovens in Venice for fear of fire breaking out around so many wooden structures, but the pizza was very very good. This particular "campo" was a little bit off the beaten path (if such a thing can be said within the Venetian city limits), and overall, it felt much more like a real neighborhood than what you see closer in. We probably didn't leave the restaurant until 9PM. For what we needed, the meal came fairly close to perfection. But why stop there? Remembering Lucy's adage, I ordered a very funny-colored, almost coffee-toned gelato -- licorice flavor! -- and it was superlative. I now know that I love licorice gelato.
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| On the traghetto |
The next day, though, the travelers fairy dust had worn off. The morning staffer at our hotel had apparently taken a cranky pill, and he would give us no advice about gondolas or glass factory tours in Murano (something the night staff had offered to help us with). After the kids again tried to make friend with the pigeons in San Marco, this time with pilfered bread sticks from Ai Sportivi, we headed to the Rialto bridge and from there, planned to splurge on a gondola ride. But we soon learned that Italian law sets the gondola passenger limit at 6. Adam tried unsuccessfully to pass Georgia off as a baby. Then he tried to pass Lucy and Georgia off as half babies. One gondola driver came running up to us, breathless, with a special offer. He could let us take two gondolas (for double the price). We gave up on the gondolas and took a traghetto (a gondola-like boat) across the canal (for only about 75 euro cents per passenger), and the kids hardly knew the difference.
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| Glass flowers on Murano |
We headed back to the hotel to get our bags and try our luck on the island of Murano, famous for its glass factories. We thought there might have been a luggage storage at the vaporetto stop, since the island is just one ferry stop from the airport, but there wasn't. We thought there would have been a wide variety of factory tours to choose from (judging by how frequently one's hotel, excepting ours, offers to arrange tours), but we couldn't find a single factory. We thought the glass museum would be easy to find, but it wasn't. We gave up on Murano glass and parked ourselves at a restaurant which worked out just fine. After lunch, we got back on the vaporetto to the airport, said our goodbyes, and then we went to our 9-passenger vehicle in the Marco Polo parking lot (where, because of it's height and overall hugeness, we had no trouble finding), and my parents, to their soon-to-be-on-strike Alitalia flight for the next leg of their trip.
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| Sue and Georgie on the ferry |
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| Lunch in Murano |
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| On the ferry |
Throughout their visit, I think we maintained a really nice balance of seeing brand new things and revisiting things we hadn't got enough of. Yes, we had spots of bad timing, bad moods, bad weather, and embarrassing kid behavior. But we had enough delicious food, unparalleled scenery, adorable kid moments, and general good luck to balance those things out. It was really nice to be able to show my parents a little bit of our beautiful and still fairly undiscovered (at least to Americans) part of the world, so, I feel lucky and we had a great time.
