Through the mountains to the sea.

Another hot trek through the early morning crowds of weekday Florence to the train station was perfectly timed to hop straight onto our next transport. This train was exactly the same type as from Rome and shot into the mountains like an arrow into a watermelon (?!). Anyway, it moved really quickly, so much so that the rivers of rain washing down the side were almost horizontal. The girls buried themselves in books whilst Dad played a game of snap. This involved trying to get a reasonable photo of the interesting sights that flashed by, many shots snapped, many shots deleted...
It was another picturesque view of many different angles of Italian life. From quaint mountainside villages to heavy industrial and poor urban landscapes and a significant amount of fertile land being farmed. They certainly do not seem to be suffering any sort of drought or lack of water here.
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Venice looks like you’d expect Venice to look like. Gondolas, gondolas and more .... gondolas. It is truly amazing – because it’s built like a maze. Maps don’t really help, but the signs do. We took a punt (not literally – you need to be careful with colloquialisms like that around here) and decided to walk through town to get to our Pension instead of catching a Water Bus. It was hard work due to the fact that every bridge over the plethora of canals has steps (they obviously designed this place before wheelchair access became a design criteria). Lugging the ever increasing weight of our luggage up and down these obstacles was tiring. We have also discovered that packing many people into a small area and giving them all different places to go at different paces brings the worst out in some. Apparently elbowing and bumping is the norm – hopefully this is a just a first impression and we don’t have to adopt this social behaviour whilst we’re here.
Eventually we made it to our room. It has a lot of character. The building was built in the 1400’s although at some stage in the last couple of years it’s been refurbished to provide modern amenities. The window shutters look like they’re almost original. It overlooks a small campo (square) close to the Rialto Bridge and is also one of the main thoroughfares in town. This does not mean the streets below are any wider; they’re just more incredibly packed and noisy. Our room is on the corner, so we get views along 2 different streets. The campo has a bar in it and as we settle down for the night the crowd below is starting to get very rowdy. According to Ro this will give the girls an insight into how stupid males can be when they get drunk.