Day 17: Venice, Italy

Randy escorted Marissa to the metro station about 10 minutes away so she could get to the airport for her flight back to MO. Then, Randy, Jeremy and I checked out and walked to the train station for our trip to Venice. We checked into Hotel Il Moro di Venezia and couldn’t figure out how to make the room cooler. Turns out, we had to tell the front desk what we wanted it set to and they controlled it for us. Weird, but ok. We explored the area around our hotel for a couple of hours then went back to the room. Unfortunately, the temperature was HOTTER in the room than when we left. So we told them the A/C wasn’t working, but they reassured us that they were cutting it down lower so it should cool off soon. We went to dinner at Rio Novo, a good seafood restaurant, then went back to a still hot room. <sigh>

Randy showed them a photo of the thermostat, showing it was 27 degrees C (80.7 degrees F — way too hot for sleeping comfortably!), so they admitted the A/C must be busted. There were no vacancies in that hotel, but fortunately, they had another property we could move to. It was further than we wanted to walk with our luggage, so we took a water taxi to get there.

I found it really Interesting to see how they’ve adapted to using boats for everything. Besides all the water taxis and gondolas, we saw a firefighter boat, a police boat, a garbage boat and delivery boats. We watched them use the crane to load pallets of supplies on and off the boats.

The new place was tricky to find since Apple Maps failed to lead us to the right street, but we figured we were close. Since there is only pedestrian traffic on Venice streets, there are tiny alleyways between the buildings and they all look similar. I was losing track of which alleys we had walked down, plus It was starting to get dark, which didn’t help. Jeremy finally decided to put it in Google Maps which led us a few minutes away, so we would have never found it on our own.

We were excited to see that the new place was actually a 2 bed, 2 bath apartment! It was super cute, too. Its location wasn’t as convenient to the train station, but it was nice to be closer to the sights we’ll see tomorrow. It saved us about 20 minutes of walking to/from. And we no longer had the free breakfast the hotel would have provided; but there was a cinnamon roll shop just a few steps from our door, so that wasn’t a problem, haha.