Mountains to the Sea

Europe is the one continent where you can order breakfast in one language while looking at glaciers and order lunch in another while dipping your toes in the sea. We said goodbye to Austria, and their wonderful bakeries, and headed for Venice by way of the Dolomites. The Dolomites are a very craggy and glaciated region of Northern Italy where they speak German. Our only regret is that we weren't able to stay longer and do some exploration.





By afternoon we were in the lowlands, the Veneto area near Venice and it sure was hot! A campground with a pool was in order and there's no shortage of them here. We set up camp in a peninsula just north of Venice that is, shall we say, a bit of Cancun in Italy. The whole region feels like one of those generic booming tourist developments of Mexico. Huge resorts, restaurants, campgrounds and water parks, all very recently built by the looks of it. It's not exactly what I had in mind when planning our European vacation, but the kids were excited and the pool sure was nice. In our last entry I was pretty sure that we couldn't top the zip-line, but water slides, swimming lagoons, and kid-oriented evening variety shows made the zip-line a distant memory.

We awoke early and headed over to Venice on the ferry. Venice is arguably the most unique city in world, and a joy to visit in spite of the crush of tourists.




We chose not to wait in lines for some of the interesting historical sites and instead we just wandered the back alleys and canals. The kids really got a kick out of seeing a "water world" town where jobs have to get done like a normal city, only using boats. We saw ambulance boats, UPS boats, tow-truck boats, and even a stinky garbage truck boat. We sat on a bridge and enjoyed watching a boat traffic jam and animated Italians give each other "directions" on how to resolve the problem.











We had a great day exploring Venice. We even broke the law and had a picnic outside of the one designated picnicking area! We caught a ferry back to our campsite and got some swimming in and a weird Italian variety show as well. Tomorrow we head south again and may be in Greece by the next internet connection.