Beautiful Venice

Is Venice, Italy on your bucket list? Venice was at the top of my bucket list when we went in 2009 and after going I added going back to Venice onto my bucket list. Go figure. It’s just like Hawaii for me. I was still new to travel blogging when we went and I posted very little on our trip to Venice. Tonight on a www.TravelingMom.com twitter party on romantic travel they asked where the most romantic place you’ve ever been. I could list 10 off the top of my head, but Venice, Italy tops that list. Here’s a photo tour about Venice 3.5 years later!

  We did tons of window shopping, including strolling through a local market. Venice is known for it’s glass and you can see from these pictures that holds true. The glass art was exquisite, as was the glass jewelry.
 Not every inch of Venice is on a canal, although most of it was! On our last morning we strolled back towards the entrance to the city to catch the bus. We stopped in a couple of shops, grabbed some lunch and hung out eating in this park.
Venice oozes romance, but at night it is so much more romantic.

       
  

Walking around the city is an experience. Even if you do nothing but walk around and hang out in cafes you’ll have a great time.


Oh, and some of the streets are pretty narrow.

• A picture tour of the Venice hotel we stayed at: Hotel Riva, Venice Italy
• Walking along the Grand Canal

Hotel Riva - Venice Hotel

     In Venice, Italy we stayed at an affordable boutique hotel called Hotel Riva.  Our Venice hotel was my favorite place we stayed while we were in Europe.  Everything about it was old and quaint.
     It was a little hard to book because you have to email them wait for them to respond and then give them credit card info. So, I had to call over there to give them that, because I sure wasn't going to put it in an email!
     Once we were there I knew we had picked a great place. It was right on the water. We had requested an air conditioned corner room with a view of the water and that's what we got. Our room was huge and we had a pretty good view. They also provided a small breakfast each morning. Just plain pastries with different spreads. It was also super close to St. Mark's square and not far from the Rialto. For the most part everything is very close together because Venice is small.

Paul is leaning out one window to take my picture and then I took his!I can't even guess how old the furniture was!

We thought the key was funny and  a little hard to use. We had to use it to get in and then again to lock the door once we were in. These are the stairs leading up to our floor. They use lots of marble in Venice because of flooding. I guess it with stands the flooding better then other materials.

Here is Paul at breakfast. A nice gal ran the little breakfast and made us coffee each morning and brought us the pastry of the day. Not the most grand breakfast but it was good! Every morning we had Cafe con leche, which is the only way I will drink my coffee in Europe.

Venice

These pictures are in no particular order but I just wanted to start sharing a little bit about Venice. Venice was amazing. It was by far my favorite of the places we went on our trip. I have never seen a city like this.  I knew before hand it would be incredible, but Venice surpassed my expectations.  I hope we have an opportunity to take our children to Venice.

This first photo is taken along the walk way between the water and St. Marks Basilica. This is a picture of some buildings on the Grand Canal. The last day of our trip we listen to Rick Steve's podcast touring the Grand Canal. Instead of riding in a water taxi we walked it using our map. We saw a lot of other cool stuff by doing it this way.

This is the only time we ate spaghetti the entire time we were in Italy. We did it a lot of other pasta! It was our first night in Venice and our hotel recommended a British pub as a good place to eat and hang out. Sure enough the food was great and there was a bunch of British people in there watching soccer!

A bridge, I don't remember which one.

This is right outside our hotel at night. We were on one of the gondola routes and each night we could hear the singing and accordion.

Trip without kids

A while back I mentioned that we had decided to go on a trip without our kids. I am so excited. We haven't had a vacation without them since 2005. It is always so hard to figure out who is going to watch them, how are we going to get them there and all that other stuff. Lucky for us my mom and sister are willing to watch them for what is going to be about two and a half weeks. We have decide to go to Italy and Spain. We are going to hit the towns of Rome, Venice, Barcelona and Madrid. We have never been to Europe.

Let me know if you have any tips on traveling over there or on any of these cities!