Piazza Porta S. Giovanni

Today we are set to leave Venice, but before we can leave the apartment we need to make sure all the trash bags are out - Venice has a unique system, people with carts go around and collect the rubbish bags, the people take these carts to a boat waiting which cranes the carts on and dumps their contents into the boat to be taken away. These people come door to door for the rubbish, so you either leave your rubbish out or they knock/ring your bell to let you know they are currently there.

Our plan was not to stick around in Venice as it gets so hot during the day, at 10am with two suitcases, our back packs and a few bridges to muster, it was already a balmy 25 degrees. We got coffee along the way in the Jewish Ghetto & caught the bus out to the parking lot where the car is parked.

We jumped onto the Autostrada heading for Lake Garda, our next destination. We arrived at Bardolino where our accomodation is for the next two nights, meeting Anja one of the workers to show us their car parking area. Anja was happy to hear about our travels so far, i mentioned in passing it was the honeymoon from 2020 we were on & she also commented how a couple from NZ a month ago stayed, that said Italians drive like crazy people!
We checked in & went for a walk around Bardolino as Anja gave us a lot of recommendations on what to see & do. We walked around to the lake side for the view and grabbed some lunch and a spritz at La Preonda. We walked back around grabbed some Gelato along the way, looked at the town and headed back to the accomodation to relax. Once we were back Anja had given us a bottle of wine as a gift to celebrate the honeymoon, so I caught up on the blogs & Katie on her TikTok while drinking some wine!

I had told Katie i really wanted to go see a church in the area… Katie was so thrilled to see yet another church, but she soon realised this wasn’t just your average church. We drove half n hour up into the hills to a village called Spiazzi and parked. From there it was a ‘gentle’ 10 minute walk to Santuario Madonna Della Corona, a very picturesque mountainside church circa 1625, on the walk down you can stop & view a sculptural depiction of Christ and the events on the day he was crucified. This church is built into the mountain with the left and rear wall being the stone from the mountain, its a steep walk down & you have to go through a tunnel to get to this, engineer me was loving this but also how they built such a monumental church here back then and we still can’t fix some roads!

We drove back to Bardolino and parked the car again, went for a walk looking what to do for dinner. Dinner out actually sounded like a wee treat rather than our only option seeing we had cooked the last three nights! We saw along the lake front there was a Ferris wheel, this is where Katie tells me she has never been on a Ferris wheel… I was shocked, i know Canterbury show isn’t the best but Katie has been to the Melbourne show! So I had to take her on it, she came to become comfortable and enjoyed it, even if the emotions came out when it stopped and she thought something was wrong!

We set off for dinner opting for Pizza at Pizzeria Bardolino, I was wanting some more wine so hastily ordered a litre of the house Rose to share… Thankfully my driving for the day had finished!
We headed back to the accomodation, I had to have another small gelato due to the heat and to offset some of the wine!Read more