A Day Trip to Venice

Just sitting here on our balcony in Pacengo, our little bit of temporary heaven, our rental in paradise, the sun has gone down and the lights of the towns across the lake are twinkling.  I did discover last night that one of the local restaurants has wi-fi, but at 2 euros an hour.  So far this vacation, every time I’ve started bitching about not having any place to write my blog, my brother Russell has started berating me for not taking the obvious step of pre-writing the blog so it will just be a quick cut and paste when I do get to an internet connection, which irritated me because he was totally missing the point, but tonight I am taking his advice.

Venice, Rialto Bridge

It is especially relaxing to be here right here, right now, after a light afternoon rain, because we just got back from Venice, which my brother Dennis described as like being in a long line to get into a concert, but there was no concert at the end.  He also described it as hell.

Venice is a victim of its own success, if such a thing is possible.  (I believe it was Yogi Berra who said of one place “Nobody goes there any more because it’s too crowded”)  It really is an interesting, unique and beautiful city but the crowd, and the heat, made for a hard day.  If you really feel the need to go there, I would suggest winter.

One really funny thing happened.  All touristy cities have fad toys.  The other day in Verona it was these little lights with a helicopted propellor on top that they shot into the air with a slingshot and it went way high, higher than any of the buildings, and came down real slow, like a descending angel or maybe a tiny, alien spacecraft.  Kind of pretty.  Today in Venice it was this strange gloopy ball that when they slammed it to the ground – actually on a flat board, but we didn’t stop to consider that – it splatted out flat and then reformed, like some gelatinous monster rising from a lagoon.  They looked really cool, they were just 2 euros and Sam really, really wanted one.  So, eventually, we relented.  He threw it to the ground and nothing really happened except it got dirty.  We tried two or three more times and it got a hole in it and the filling started to leak out.  It was absolutely worthless which, for everybody except Sam, was funnier than if it had actually worked.