July 18th - 21st
In the morning said our goodbyes to Roma, picked up the car from airport and had a 7 hour drive to Venice in front of us. We arrived late afternoon, parked car in a multi storey at end of bridge (connecting mainland to Venice) and were savvy enough to use our GPS on walking mode to find our hotel in amongst all the canals and bridges. Our hotel room was big, the hotel itself was in a old building with big wide corridors, set on a quiet street, with the canal at our feet.
We headed straight out in search of some yummy food. We ate at a restaurant on the canal banks, then wandered around before having another galati to finish off the night.
In the morning after a decent sleep we headed out to see all the sights of Venice, we wandered to San Marco Square (St Mark's Square), the Bridge of Sighs, the famous Rialto Bridge, and took a private Gondola through the canals and out on the Grand Canal. We had read you could pay €60 for a private gondola or ask others to share, we asked a few people if they wanted to share but they declined, as my mum and dad had given us money for coming away, we decided to splash out.
We both loved Venice and would like to go back sometime. But it was time to leave and get on our way to next overnight destination, on the way we stopped off at the pretty town of Verona, made famous by Romeo and Juliet. Verona was beautiful, on the banks of the Adige River, there were old buildings, a lively street market, street performers which were awesome, we couldn't work out how they were all balancing! And of course Juliet's house. I got a love heart stitched with our names outside her house, which was pretty cool.
We then carried on to Albavilla just south of Lake Como, where we stayed the night, we were overlooking a massive lake and it was very pretty, the hotel was rather grand looking, we didn't do much in Albavilla as we arrived quite late after a late start then over 3 hours of driving.
Left Albavilla in the morning and headed to the nearby Lake Como. We drove around the lake looking at all the fabulous houses which were oversized and hiding behind a forest of tall trees. We were actually hunting around for George Clooney's house; we think we spotted it but not sure. (We had googled it, so we knew what it looked like). We took the opportunity to get the bikini on and sunbathed for a bit, and Shan got in the lake for a swim! The lake water comes from the mountains and I'd led to believe the water was rather chilly, even for July.
