39 Venice Day 2 and leaving Europe

Venice – Day 2.

Breakfast was interesting. There are 64 of us and a group from France of about 40. The breakfast room seats 15 at a time. We had been given shifts to eat but people still wound up waiting in line for a seat. We are going to skip breakfast tomorrow.

We head for the waterbus and after a false start in which we got on a bus that did not go all the way to our stop; we managed to get the right bus that took us to the island of Murano. Murano is home to several glass blowing factories and about 200 glass-selling shops. We had a great and very relaxing day. The weather was great and the shops were very uncrowded. There just are not enough tourists this time of year to go around. We found a very nice place to eat lunch and were the only non-Italian people in the place. We made our way back to the hotel, dropped our loot, and then headed out on foot to “get lost.” Rick Steves writes that you are going to get lost but not to worry you are on an island and so you can’t get hopelessly lost.

We ran into several groups of our students as we wondered around, including one girl who was not far from our hotel. She had gone out on her own to get some food and the waiter was trying to pick her up and was insisting that she have a drink with him at 11:00. She spotted us, ran out, and asked if we would pretend to be her parents so she could say no without appearing too rude. I did not quite understand the logic but we played along.

We are back at the hotel and trying to figure out how to repack our suitcases. It will be even more fun tomorrow in London as we rearrange our luggage so that we can get things under 50 pounds. We hope.

Leaving Italy,

The trip to London had a bit of a hiccough in it. It seems there was a strike of the luggage handlers in Venice and thus our flight was diverted to Verona. British Airways provided bus service from Venice to Verona (all the way across the north of Italy). The trip took nearly 2 hours and it was actually very enjoyable. So now, I get to stick a pin in Verona on my wall map. While in Verona we did check and Romeo and Juliet are still dead.

We got to the hotel with some struggle after being picked up at Gatwick and being taken to Heathrow by the Harlaxton crew. We struggled with 7 pieces of luggage from Heathrow to our hotel and I kept explaining to folks that we had been living here for 4 months and were now moving back to the US. That was why all the luggage. We were not here for a long weekend with all the luggage.

Tomorrow we head to the US.