Day 25: Venice

Venice Canale
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Note to self: Make sure you room has air-conditioning to enable three people to sleep in 30oC.

We left Pisa after Billy’s orange juice and potato chip breakfast.

Chioggi was a beautiful little town, the old section was charming

We head north east towards Venice along the Autostrada, and planned to get to a town outside Venice (Padova) which is the most direct route without our getting lost. On the way we passed Barberino again (just North of Florence) and as we’d noticed some factory outlets there we decided to stop for lunch. We spent a good hour and a half at the huge factory outlets however, the only thing that was purchased was a Tamagotchi hat on Billy’s Tamagotchi (Alex) and an ice-cream. We learnt the new Italian word: Cornetto and Sardi (Sale) and that there is no way Will intends to wear any jeans the colour of gelati.

After the realization that pretty well everything was damn expensive we headed out of there and on to Padova. However, we changed our mind on the journey and decided to head to the resort town of Chioggi (just South of Venice). We didn’t take the most direct route and attempted to follow signs, which, as always, was a bad idea. However, we did find some lovely roads particularly one running along a river bank that was barely one and a half cars wide with no particularly speed limit and trucks flying along it. We ended up nestled in behind a petrol tanker for quite a while which gave us cover as the cars going the other way weaved half off the road to avoid it.

Chioggi was a beautiful little town, the old section was charming, with waterways (similar to Venice) and cobble stone roads. We made our way through it looking for the beach, when we got there, it was a hotel strip, with scores of hotels, and thousands of bathing lounges setup on the beaches. We checked the prices of a few hotels there and eventually decided that maybe we should head to Venice and find something there. It was already 5pm by this stage.

We headed to Venice and got there to find that cars basically could arrive, either park in the underground, pickup/dropoff, or go round a roundabout and back to the mainland. As we didn’t’ have a hotel booked we decided to go back to the mainland for the night. We were getting very hungry by this stage and were pretty tired after driving most of the day. The drive had been relatively smooth, although, as always the traffic makes it take longer than predicted. It seems very difficult to work out when there is going to be a queue, a lot of lanes are constantly blocked off for maybe 10kms and you may see one group of 5 workmen with a few machines standing around (seemingly doing no work) within that 10km section. Apart from that however the Autostrada works really well.

We feel we have the hang of searching for hotels now, we just double park and Kimmy runs in to get the best rate possible. This worked pretty well, we’ve found that very few hotels are full (unlike suggested in everyone’s summer guides), out of every hotel we’ve asked only two have not had rooms available.

We ended up finding a hotel in Marghera which is a little suburb a stones throw away from Venice. We’re only about 500metres from the train station and only one stop to Venice (Venizia), so the location is great (plus there’s a Maccas at the station which is nice). The aircon in the hotel is so-so, but the hotel was good at 100 euro for a double (Billy sharing with us), a swimming pool and breakfast. The hotel is 4 star so is very cheap for 4 star and is called the Hotel Lugano.

With the air-con being so-so it was very hot so sleeping was rather difficult, however, it was quiet.