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

Walking along the Grand Canal

vHere are some pictures I took as I walked along the grand canal in Venice Italy. It was so peaceful and calm everywhere we went.

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.

Vacation to Italy and Spain

     Our travels were amazing and we took about 1500 pictures. So, I have lots of blogging to do. Each city was neat and each was completely different from the others. My favorite was Venice, Italy and Paul's favorite was Rome, Italy. We can't wait to take the kids to Italy someday, but probably not Spain. 

      Rome, Italy was our first stop and we saw as many things as we could in four days. There is just so much to see and do. We both loved the Sistine chapel. We loved all the history and the amazing churches. We enjoyed hanging around the pantheon and Novena plaza. It was so relaxing and the food was great as was the beer and wine.

     Venice, Italy was stunning. We did not do much here but walk around, eat, drink and hang out. We went on a gondola ride just a little before sunset and hardly anyone else was in the canal at this time so it was peaceful and private and the bottle of wine we took on was the best wine we had the whole trip. After we got done with the gondola we went and found a quite little area and sat on the steps looking at the water drinking the rest our wine.

     By the time we traveled to Barcelona we were worn out. We flew to the wrong airport (Thanks Ryan Air). We had one very long bus ride, some confused walking around, and a taxi ride that we weren't sure they guy understood us!  We arrived at our hotel at two in the morning. Much to our delight it was a five star hotel and we ordered lots of room service so we weren't starving when we went to bed. The next two days we did a bus tour, strolled Las Ramblas and through the Gothic quarter. We squeezed in the Picasso musuem, Sagrada Familia, and other sights and spent our last day laying at the beach.

     Madrid was very different then all the other places. we went to lots of art museums. By now we had gotten used to the tapas thing, but found three really great Mexican food places so we ate nothing but tacos and tapas for days. While we were in Madrid August 15 is some sort of holiday there and it was just one big raging party in the streets. It was so fun. We went back to that area the next night ready to dance and have more fun but I guess they don't party like that everynight.

Well, I could just keep going and going so I will stop for today but will post more soon!