Northern Italy

We almost made the mistake of getting on the boat that would have taken us to the boat via the airport, about a two-hour addition to our schedule. Such an option was not acceptable to us, because we needed to return to our boat by 2:30 pm in order to join the group that was to visit one of the Murano art glass factories on Giudecca Island.

On the vaporetto I decided to go astern to photograph St. Mark’s Square from the water. There was a German family there with a father who acted as though he wanted to be the commandant of the whole world. Unlike his sons, he never acknowledged that I was even sitting in front of him. When I took their picture, he looked straight up, as though if he were not looking at me, then I could not see him.

We returned to St. Marta’s, in view of the ship. The only problem was that we found a locked gate between us and our boat. We asked a policeman on a bicycle how to get back to the ship. He told us, in broken English, to get on the “People Mover,” and to get off at the first stop. This would lead us to the street we saw on the other side of the chain-link fence going to the River Countess. With some confusion and difficulty we made our way to the People Mover and found our way to the ticket machine and up one storey to the loading platform. After just a few seconds I saw that we passed over the road leading back to the ship, and continued to travel toward downtown Venice. The sense of helplessness was palpable. We got off at the next exit, and found that we were in the Piazza le Romana. Both Jim and I had maps. We charted a course back to the ship and started making our way south. Unfortunately, there were several places where the name of the street did not precisely line up with the street’s location. Betty and Glenda got worried, though Jim and I basically knew where we were, and were confident that eventually we would make it back to the ship. We wandered through some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the city. Though I did not know it at the time, this walk through a less visited part of Venice would be one of the high points of the whole trip for me. When we saw the ship we hit another obstacle. We were separated from it by a chain link fence with a locked gate. So we had to backtrack several blocks, trying to remember exactly where the ship was until we hit a street that went without obstruction to the south. Finally we found one, and came out at the ship. We did manage to get back to the River Countess in time to go to the glassworks on Giudecca Island.Les mer