Day 29

We had decided last night that we would do a night cruise of Venice tonight so we didn’t plan on heading into Venice until late. Therefore, we completely wasted our morning – it was awesome! We didn’t get out of bed until 10:30 and just bummed around in our pjs reading and surfing the net. I know it sounds lame but it was just so nice to do nothing and not have to worry about dashing off to see something or do something for a change.

Steve’s parents got sick of us (they’d already been super productive in the morning and were bored) so we arranged to meet them near St Mark’s Square at 4 so that they could head into Venice. We went for a swim in the pool, which was chilly by the way, had some lunch, did some packing and then headed into Venice around 2:30.

By the time we had walked to the bus station (the shuttle bus didn’t run between 12 pm and 6 pm), caught the bus in, transferred to a water bus to take us to St Mark’s Square and then arrived at the meeting point, it was about 4. Steve’s parents arrived soon after us so we then headed down to St Mark’s Basilica where there may have been even more people than yesterday as a few cruise ships had arrived.

We decided to just grin and bear it so we lined up and the line ended up moving fairly quickly. Unfortunately when we got to the front we weren’t allowed to take our back packs in. Conveniently, there was a luggage service that St Mark’s offered around the corner – for a small fee of course. We decided to take it in turns wandering the basilica so that the two outside could babysit the packs.

St Mark's Basilica

St Mark’s was pretty cool. Lots of gold everywhere. There were signs all around saying no photography which heaps of people were just blatantly ignoring (not us though). The funniest one was an old dude with an SLR that had a MASSIVE lense. It was pretty hard not to miss but the attendants weren’t saying anything so he just kept on clicking away.

After the Basilica we thought we might check out the Doge’s Palace. The entrance fee was $13 per person so we thought we would give it a miss given that it was already after 5 and the place closed at 6 plus we, well, at least Steve and I, were starting to get a bit over old buildings. Very uncultured, I know.

Instead we walked down the waterfront until we reached a nice little area where we wandered around and explored the south east corner of Venice. We had dinner at a nice little restaurant, watched the sunset and then got on a water bus to Lido Island. We only had about half an hour to wander around before we had to get back on another water bus to take us back to the bus terminal

Sunset

Venice by night was lovely. As we had gotten on at the very first stop, we had prime seats outside at the front of the boat. The city was much nicer at night when you couldn’t see how run down some of the buildings had gotten and some buildings, restaurants and the bridges along the Grand Canal were lit up.

Grand Canal at night

We caught the shuttle bus back, got ready for bed and prepared for another day of travelling...