and we are off to venezia!

after a whirlwind tour of rome, we took a train and headed to venice. upon arrival, i was much impressed to see what a great job the venetian hotel in vegas had done. they looked an awful lot alike!


our little hotel. it was lovely - decorated with lots of venetian glass chandeliers. it was on a canal, but not the main canal.
http://www.cadogaressa.com/


this was mom and dad's room.


and this is the nice view they had!


after checking in to our rooms, it was time for a late lunch and so we found a place to eat. it wasn't too far from our hotel (nothing in venice is all that far) and it was good. afterwards, we decided to walk around the city.


we then decided to take the vapporato which is venice's version of public transportation - the vapporato is its water bus. you can take water taxis as well - but they cost a heckuva lot more money than the bus.


andrew, dad and mom hanging out on our vap ride. we decided we liked sitting and looking so we took the vapporato as far as we could and then back to the rialto where we got off to shop and check things out.


from the vap, there was this poster - saw this poster kind of everywhere - it's a cat head on a man's body and it creeped me out!!


the famous rialto bridge.


this made me think of sarah macschwindy so i had to take a picture. see? i thought of you guys everywhere!


carl and dad consulting the map, again. told you this would be a theme on the trip!


while they were looking for directions, mom and i spied a cute kitty in the window who was talking to us. if you'd like to see an assortment of other animal photos, my mom took tons of italian cats and dogs!


a pretty building with pretty flowers.


a scene from a canal.



dinner that night was at a restaurant across the canal from our hotel (and it took 3 bridges to get to the other side!) - the three arches or something along those lines in italian of course - they had great food! and we were sitting out along the canal - dinner was again 3 hours and we managed to stay so long that the tide must have risen and so our feet kept getting wet. when we got up from dinner, we even found a crab that had washed up on to the sidewalk. mom thought the name of the viagra pizza was funny.


they sure were on top of their drinks - they kept bringing the vino and some other concoctions. carl is trying one of them here - it was quite tasty - and strong! none of us knew what the heck it was though!


and i thought the final picture of this day should be the venice sunset - taken while we were eating dinner at the restaurant.