Venice

Sorry this has taken so long to put up but we've been really jet-lagged.

The cruise into Venice was pretty cool since we got to go right alongside the city. A bunch of the first pictures were shot right from the balcony of our room. After disembarking we took the slowest shuttle on the water down to St Mark's. We took it pretty easy looking around since we'd have a full day on Monday for more sightseeing with hopefully less crowds.

While trying to get back to the ship we got kind of lost. The problem would be that you could see where you wanted to go but as soon as you rounded the corner you'd run into a canal without a bridge in site! On the trek back we wandered through one of the residential sections of the city. It was pretty interesting to see how much quieter it was there vs the touristy areas around St Marks. Katie had a great observation though for why it was so quiet... no cars!

Dinner was on the ship and final packing so we could disembark the next morning.

Disembarking was no big deal and after stowing our gear at the hotel we headed out into the city again. Of course being in a foreign city where we knew about 20-30 people max from the cruise we ran into a bunch of them over the course of the day. Highlights from what we saw were finally getting into St Mark's and also going up in the bell tower, the Venice academy gallery, and an exhibit featuring recreations of DaVinci's engineering projects from his notebooks. We also tried what our guidebook claimed was the best gelato spot in Venice. It really was good and I think my new favorite combination is now the green apple and caramel that I had there!

The flight back home was fairly uneventful but long since we had an extra stop in SLC that wasn't on our original itinerary. It kinda sucked that we didn't have the individual touch screens in the seat back on the Venice->JFK leg like we did coming over.

And that was it. Definitely an awesome trip all around.