Milan/Venice/Riva del Garda, Italy - Day 1

After a not so painful journey across the Atlantic Jen and I made it to Milan, Italy. Zoom Airline rocks. For only $349 (plus tax, so under $500 total) we got to London; the food was great, the movies were good, the legroom was fine, you can book your flight on their website, I recommend them to anyone. So poo on you, to everyone who told us to “Have Fun” on Zoom 🙂

The other thing that had me worried was the fact that we had only purchased oneway tickets. But of course, not a word was mentioned about this (particularly when entering Italy, which was where i was really concerned, since we had no proof we were ever leaving). In fact come to think of it, not a word was mentioned at all when entering Italy.

Spent only one night in Milan; not a tonne to see there except the Duomo, which is the 3rd largest church in the world (worth the walk). Other than that, lots of expensive stores and good looking people.

Took the train the next day to Venice. North America needs to get its head out of its arse, and start building trains like Europe. 3 hours to Venice, costs 20 euro. Almost all of our time in Venice was spent either walking or riding a boat, and while doing so, being completely lost. The advice I had was to bring a compass, but I think it requires more than a compass to not get lost in Venice (maybe a helicopter would have helped).

We spent 4 nights in Venice; went to 3 different islands while there (the boats were kind of intimidating at first, but once we mastered them they were very handy), and did a whole lot of walking around. The crowds were crazy (completey full of tourists… couldn’t imagine coming during high season)… didn’t seem like anyone even lived on the island. That said, every time you turn your head, you could take a picture and it would be interesting enough to make it on the front page of an edition of National Geographic. I’m thankful we got to see Venice while it’s still above water; I don’t know how it was 20 years ago, but during high tide, the canals are literally inches from flooding the entire city… at certain locations they have to put walkways out on top of the sidewalks every day so that people can get to certain buildings.

Yesterday we took a train and bus to a small resort town called Riva del Garda on the north end of Garda Lake… very similar to a place like Penticton. Today was spent walking to the top of a rocky peak to check out some old ruins of a castle we could see from the town. But much to our shagrin we got all the way up there to find the whole thing roped off, and had to spend 2 hours walking all the way back without seeing it. But it was ok because we walked through a couple cool little villages on the way, and saw some great views en route.

Anyway, I’ve spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to upload pics to the blog now so I’d better run, and hopefully this works!