Venice

On the 18th of August we drive from Rome to Venice.

Venice was on Stella’s travel wish list.

Having investigated the price of the train, to find that the tickets were about one hundred euro each, just for one way, we decide that car hire, auto strada tolls and a 48 hour parking ticket at the venice parking garage will be more economical. It does however, mean driving at 130 km in the slow lane which is frightening. Italian drivers are fairly impatient on the auto strada and if you don’t go fast enough they drive right up your bumper and beep their horn.

We make a detour at Cortona, realising that we will not see any countryside if we stay on the auto strada the whole way.

Cortona is one of those beautiful Italian hill towns that is full of American tourists and boutique gift shops. We don’t stay long.

Back on the road, we drive for another three hours until we reach Venice. The Italian country side is very orderly and extremely beautiful. I don’t think hay looks this good in New Zealand.

It’s crazy in Venice. The rest of the holidaying world are obviously all here. We park in the San Marco Garage on the Venice side of the causeway, where we leave the keys to the car and any excess luggage that we can bear to lose if worse comes to worst. With the rocks in our packs, walking any distance is becoming quite challenging and it is a relief to leave those behind in the car. Time and time again, I wonder why we have ended up carrying so much. I’m a creature of habit who inevitably wears the same clothes everyday anyway and I certainly didn’t need five pairs of shoes. It is very liberating to walk with a lighter pack and the fifteen minute walk to the apartment seems like half the effort.

Our old Venice apartment is another airbnb rental and we are met in the square outside by a lovely woman who looks after the house.

The owner is obviously juggling a number of low-cost rentals as maintenance leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, traversing the dark stone steps to the second floor with no lighting is a little hair-raising.

We spend a lot of time as a family discussing the things we would do to the apartment if it were ours. Light bulbs and a kitchen bench would be first on the list. But we’re in Venice, so all of that stuff doesn’t really matter. At least we’ve found somewhere that we can afford to stay. The house is on the edge of a square in a more residential, less touristy, part of Venice. From our little balcony, we look across to the church and can watch local families chucking a ball around in the square. Everyone in Venice seems to have a designer dog. Some even ride in prams.

The following day is our only sightseeing day but it still takes us until almost lunchtime to get out the door. We head towards San Marco Square where the throngs of tourists become more and more intense until we can hardly move. Stella and I are in heaven: what better place to take photographs?

I have a romantic idea of wondering around the streets of Venice after a leisurely lunch of wine and pasta, perhaps a little tipsy and wearing a floaty vintage dress. This is a fantasy I have quite often, despite not being a wearer of dresses.

But of course, we’re not going to have lunch at a restaurant. Even if you can find somewhere affordable to buy takeaway food in Venice, finding a spot to sit and eat it, is much harder. After being shooed away from the steps of a swanky-looking art gallery, we end up sitting on the footpath near the Grand Canal. It is at that moment that it occurs to me that we have passed the threshold between normal-looking family on holiday and long-term back-packers eating food out of greasy paper bags.  I notice that people are staring at us as they pass and it probably doesn’t help that we are also sharing a  small bottle of champagne that we are drinking directly from the bottle.

Not much has changed since I Iast visited Venice, except for the fact that we actually have somewhere to stay.

The kids would all like to ride on a gondola but at 100 euros per ride, this seems to be the domain of Chinese and American tourists.

I imagine that employing the services of an accordion player would cost even more and is strictly in the realm of the romantic couples’ holiday. I’ll store this fantasy away with the floaty vintage dress for future visits to Venice.

At some point after lunch, Roger starts singing Opera as we walk through the streets. This might normally be funny, but for some reason everyone is a bit titchy today and perhaps my expectations of the day are a little different from the reality. They might have included Opera, but probably sung by a Venetian professional on a Gondola, not Roger.

For the first time on the trip, I intentionally lose myself in order to have some time alone. The fact that Stella and Jasper are following close behind is lost on me while I sit in a dead end alley next to a smelly canal, crying desperately for the loss of something. They sit down with me and hold my hand until the cloud has passed.

And as my mother always said, “I must be tired”.

At some point in Greece, I thought I had found the holy grail of family travel: Acceptance.

Accepting firstly that we are who we are and travel will not necessarily change us. That having expectations about the success of the journey will cause inevitable disappointment and frustration and that one day we may look back and know we have grown through the past year but it may not be immediate or obvious.

After we split up, the exploring becomes more leisurely and we wander through the quieter streets, looking for little pockets of beauty. Jasper and I have fun finding mail boxes that look like robot faces and we visit a church which claims to house the most beautiful painting in the world. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly nice to look at.

We arrive home to Roger who is out on the balcony having a beer.
Everything is alright with the world.