Road Trip to Venice

This was a long day of driving. First we went back down the mountain, and then we moved a ways to the east and went back up and over the mountain. The drive through the mountains was pretty. Lots of great long bridges and many many tunnels. The nicest tunnels were not really tunnels but rather covered roadways. This protects the cars from landslides as well as snowfall.

Once we got into Italy we drove around the outside of Milano. The traffic was "intenso" and the going was rather slow. About 1:00 we were hungry enough that we decided to check out the next town for some food. We saw a mall off to the side of the road so we checked it out. We decided to have some pizza at a restaurant called "Pizza Pause." This was fine except that the young man waiting on us did not speak a word of english. We nearly ended up with twice as much pizza as we wanted. In the end it worked out fine and the pizza was pretty good.

It was pretty confusing getting into the parking lot in Venice called Tronchetto. And once we got there we had to figure out where we were going to get to the Vaporetto and where we were going to get our tickets etc. It all worked out just fine and we ended up on the right Vaporetto to our stop and San Ste. From there it was a tricky but short walk to our hotel, the Hotel San Angelo.

The room is not too big, but it has two nice beds and a couch to sit on. The bathroom has a toilet and Duvet along with the tub/shower. All the lights in the room go out if you take the key out of the slot next to the door. The Internet service does not work like it should. there is some problem getting it to accept the security password for the wireless.

After getting settled we decided to take a walk before we headed down to meet Ulring's at their hotel. Venice has thousands and thousands of little shops to look at and walk through. Of course now that we were in Italy Josh was on full alert for a Totti soccer shirt. We saw a couple of stalls selling soccer shirts and we managed to get by the first couple. But, once we got to the Rialto bridge they had a store that was selling genuine Soccer shirts and that was pretty much the end of it. 69 euros later Josh had a genuine italian soccer shirt. They print the name and number on the shirt once it is chosen, so we had 20 minutes to kill.

We found a restaurant at the base of the Rialto bridge that had a nice view of the water, so we sat down there for a beer, wine and soda. After watching the people for 20 minutes Josh and I walked back to pick up his shirt. As promised the shirt was ready and waiting for us and Josh was one happy boy.

Just as we were crossing the top of the Rialto, we saw the Ulrings! Who would have thought that we would just randomly find them here in the city. They joined us for a little refreshment while we planned our move for supper.

In addition to the recommendations from our hotel manager Jim and Nancy had found an Indian restaurant and a Thai restaurant not too far from our hotel. After some walking around we decided on the Indian restaurant called - - We had an excellent meal. The kids all had Lashkis (sweet yoghurt drinks) along with Naan (bread) and several different curries. I had the chicken Vinaloo, Jane had Chicken Curry, Jim had a shrimp dish and Nancy had Chicken Khorma. The chicken Khorma proved to be very popular with the kids as well. Josh even said he liked the sauce on his rice. We also had a variety of tandoori food as part of an appetizer plate. It was all good, and the total for all nine of us was 190 euros.

After dinner we walked some more until we all decided to split up and head for our hotels for the night. The plan is to meet the next day at noon at the statue in front of Ulring's hotel, the Londra Palace.