had a 130 minute boat ride on a 50 minute ticket…
bur first, a word from our sponsor… folks, do you need a bed & breafast 20 minutes outside venice italy? then try the faronhof b&b near the village of mira at www.faronhof.com. our 4 day trip will have been worth it just for our fotos yesterday and today and our b&b breakfast conversation this morning with our hostess and her 2 guests from taiwan and china. talked food, politics, history, global warming, rats – and the slowly sinking venice having no sewer system and being a 1,600 year old stone city built on top of wood and water where the giant rats ate all the venician cats and outnumber the citizens 4 to 1.
we bicycled a couple kilometers to the village of mira to bus into venice this morning little knowing it would be dark before we returned. i forgot the name of the village, forgot to check for identifiable landmarks or to time the journey so i’d know when we got back to where we started. it is amazing what the most brilliant of us can forget to do. fortunately we knew there was a river on the left and a well lit foodstore on the right – and it was just enough. learn and live. then we bicycled back in the dark – real serious no lights cloudy sky dark on narrow curving country lanes with a 6 foot drop into a small stream type of darkness… when oncoming cars passed, their lights blinded us so we road on faith, hope and charity through the cow manure fragrant night. kathy found it fun while i kept waiting to bicycle over her broken body.
venice is like an exponetially confusing amsterdam – the alleys are much more numerous and way more narrow, and the canals split forever into smaller and smaller fractals. you walk down narrowing edgar allen poe tunnels and over ever smaller escher foot bridges with frequent dead ends. delightful really. to top the day we thought we’d take a water taxi around the island of venice, maybe a 20 minute trip. our ticket was valid for 50 minutes. what i read as 9 stops oround venice were really 9 islands – took us over two hours to make the loop. for the last hour i was staring ahead hoping i’d recognize the backass view of where we’d left so we could leave.
tried to get tickets home to pula and were told you can’t get there from here even though we got here from there, so we’ll train back to trieste tomorrow and try again.
welcome to the rat maze… best bring your own cheese.