December 3, 2025
It’s hard to believe that we slept and woke up in Venice today. The world is a small place with planes, trains and automobiles. Yes, we had a long layover in EWR. But if you think about it, our actual travel time of some 12 hours to go all the way from SLC to VCE (Venice) is quite amazing.
I personally woke up around 4 AM today. Not sure why. I think subconsciously that I was thinking about sleeping by ‘poopy hair’ and didn’t want to get any on me! Nah…just kidding. I was up til 11 writing the blog post. But I slept hard until 4 AM then turned to my side of bed to research the water boats as I knew everyone wanted to go see glass blowing on the island of Murano. A single ticket for 70 minutes of water taxi riding costs €9.50. But for €25 you get a 24 hour pass and you can use any public mode of transportation where ACTV Venice operates. So we ended up riding the water buses to 3 islands and back to Venice. We also used a bus on the island of Lido to get back to the ferry dock from the beaches that we walked to. Pretty good deal.
We were up going around 10 AM. I did fall back to sleep for a few hours probably around 6 AM. That was good. Our first journey was to the island of Murano where glass blowing is done. All the islands around here have glass pieces that were hand made on this island. We watched a guy make a drinking glass and then a horse. For the horse, once the glass is hot, he only has 1.5 minutes to make the figure. He can’t re-heat it. So he has to move quickly. He was amazing to watch as he pulled and touched until the horse was complete. They had a gallery of some amazing work done at this particular shop. Very expensive but beautiful stuff. Denise bought some of Murano glass on the next island we went to. Murano was a fast stop.
Next island was Burano. This was not on our radar when we set out in the morning. But doing some research while traveling, Burano and its beautifully colored homes were highly recommended. And this small island did not disappoint. Fun little shops, differing colored homes and small canals all around us. We really enjoyed the time spent in Burano. I even found a sandwich that was really good and only cost €2 which made the sandwich taste even better.
After Burano, we took a ferry ride for nearly an hour to get to Lido. 12+ years ago, with Dale and Julee, my in-laws, we stayed on the island of Lido. I remembered taking Julee to the beaches there and her just loving to walk the beach searching for the best sea shells. Nothing has changed here relative to the beach…tons of shells everywhere. I think Michelle gathered up enough for all of us. It was a bit of a walk to get to the beach from the boat dock. So we ended up using our day pass to ride the bus back to the dock where we caught the Line 1 bus back to Venice. And instead of getting off the water taxi at our stop, we carried on to the train station to check out how long it is going to take tomorrow morning to get there. I think we can catch the 7:08 AM ferry and that will give us enough time to catch the 8:05 train to Firenze (Florence). Before we headed home from the train station, we found a place to eat…yes…Italian food. It was not as good as last nights dinner. It was just ok.
I think I mentioned that I forgot a belt on this journey and I was going to make that be my first order of business once here in Venice. But Jeff had a belt that fit me. So I used that yesterday. But a fellow from Africa stopped us in a square and put bracelets on Denise and Michelle. Obviously he was only going to take money back. He also showed us a belt that he ‘wanted’ to give us which I said keep it. Anyway, I left and started walking. But apparently when Denise went to give him some money for the bracelets to get him off her back, he saw that she had €20. He grabbed it and threw the belt at her and then took of running away. Soooo…I now have a new belt. All good. I probably would have paid that much for a belt anyway.
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