Away & Around 2022

Today’s travel experience was expected and unexpected. We’d expected to experience travel glitches during our journey, we just hadn’t expected to experience so many on a single day🙃. First delay - train from Wimbledon delayed due to “emergency works”. No problem -we reroute and make the hour long trip to Heathrow. Second delay-huge line at Swiss Air. While waiting I receive a text update that the flight is delayed 15 minutes. Not a big delay but we now have only 30 minutes to make our connection in Zurich. We make the Zurich flight but an additional delay is announced as we wait on the plane ✈️. Kai naps on flight. I work. Our seats are the very last seats on the plane. We are thus the very last people off the plane. Third delay- another line at immigration but the first miracle occurs-our connecting flight to Venice is delayed. The single clerk at immigration is processing a mass of time stressed travelers. The tension in the line of waiting passengers is acute. We all have flights leaving in minutes. Kai and I let 2-3 especially desperate travelers ahead of us thinking we have extra time due to the announced delay. We clear customs and hope to find food but it turns out- the flight is holding for us (I had the time wrong). We run to board the flight🎉. Thank you Swiss Air for waiting for us. Delay four- we made our flight but our bags have not. The line for baggage assistance is long, again there is a single clerk. (Dante missed a particularly tortuous level of hell- waiting in interminably long lines with little hope of progress.) We make our report and board the waterbus for Venice. It’s a beautiful and delightful 1.25hr boat ride. We enjoy watching the sunset 🌅 and the moonrise🌕 over Venice. We disembark at San Marco- our room is 10 minutes walk away. Delay five- we can’t find our hotel. We can get within 1 minute of it using google maps but can’t find it. Everywhere we look are befuddled travelers with phones set to google maps trying to navigate Venic’s labyrinth of cobblestone alleys and passage ways. Miracle 2 is that our bags were lost. We are tired after dragging our small carry-on bags up, down, over, and across the many, many small canals and waterways of Venice. We would not have survived with our suitcases. It’s now very dark and late. We have gelato (miracle 3) for dinner and to refuel before contuing our hotel search. An older Venetian couple stops to help us. Essentially- they don’t know where the hotel is either and tell us us “it’s impossible to find your way around Venice” and that we should call for the hotel for rescue. Perhaps - Global Gaurdian should add Venice Navigation to their package of services… It’s 11:30 when we find our hotel. Our room is on the 3rd floor. There is no elevator🥺.Read more