Part 2: Venice

First: Venice is a really, really acceptable city. Preferring to see what I saw rather than treat the trip like homework, I purposely didn't do a lot of research before going. The flight from Munich was unremarkable and the weather was predictably hot and rainy, There's no motorized vehicle in Venice except for boats, so I caught a bus at the airport and struck out for the island. From the central bus depot it was a short, three hour walk to the hotel.

 

Here's the thing that you really need to know about Venice. For the first ten hours you feel more lost than you have probably ever felt before. You feel so lost you despair of it. But somehow, by the middle of the next day, after a couple cups of coffee and some pastry, you realize that you can't get really get that lost--it's an island after all--and a pretty small one at that. So you wander around for a while (lost of course) but you start to get a feel for the way the city moves just the same.

I was only there four days, but was very impressed; you really couldn't walk more than a few minutes any direction without seeing something genuinely beautiful. The following are a couple examples in no particular order:

  

I had a couple meals to rival Munich while in Venice, but the place I'll really remember as the best is Ristorante Rosa Rosa, which first got my attention by playing Diana Krall's cover of "The Heart of Saturday Night" but kept my attention with some very nice dishes, including a great all vegetable antipasto and a delicate pizza.

I had planned on a least a couple runs while I was there, but the crowds were just way too much. Instead, I walked a lot and saved my energy for the hiking I will talk about in part three.