Venice- very romantic!

So like I had written, I had been to Venice before and loved it previously. So I was curious to see what my husband would think of those amazing city. The day before John Heald, the head cruise director of all of Carnival and our cruise director for the cruise came over the loud speakers. He notifies us that the day we are in Venice is the one day that public transportation works in Italy will be going on a one-day strike. This means no public vaparettos will be running. However, they have contracted with a company to offer it from the port for a certain price and if you want to use it you can or you can walk to the city. Since I had been to Venice, I knew the city was not that big and is easily walked. However, we did not have a map or anything, so what did we do? We chose to walk to town without a map and would take the shuttle back later that night! By the way, on the way into Venice, Carnival announces you are entering it and it is a gem. PLEASE make sure to get up and watch as you stroll in. You pass right by St. Marks and it is just a really neat city to come into on a cruise boat. We grabbed some breakfast and sat there and watched while we took a bunch of a pictures and just enjoyed the scenery on our balcony that faced this view.

So we get off and the lines are SPECTACULAR--very long! We find out way to the city rather easily--we followed others--but once we found the Grand Canal, I knew we were good and it was not far at all from the port. We decide we are just going to enjoy a nice walk to the Rialto Bridge but decide we will break for lunch. We stop at this place and grab our usual pizza and a new pasta. We really enjoyed this lunch break. Here are some pictures of our walk to this point and lunch.

So we head off from lunch and get to Rialto Bridge which is packed. I wasn't really shocked by this, there are signs pointing you to the bridge by the way and then to St. Mark's Square as well. So you can find these places pretty easily. So we walked into some stores and looked around and took some pictures, but we wanted to head to St. Mark's more. So we started to head that way and once there we were really hot and actually chose to go rest in the Royal Gardens before our Murano, Burano, and Torcello tour. We were there about 45 minutes before we jumped on our pre-booked tour through Viator.

We get on the boat for the tour and our first stop is going to be Murano which takes about 30-40 minutes by boat in the lagoon. There will be a glass showing here, which was neat! It was extremely hot in the room, FYI. The heat they need to melt that glass has to be hot, so boy it was! After the 10 minute showing, we only have about 25 minutes to walk around and enjoy Murano. We decide to not purchase anything in the store attached to the showing because I thought their prices were high. We walk a couple stores down and find more affordable jewelry items. I recommend doing this. We get back to the boat and head to Torcello!

Torcello was a neat little island, however, we were only given 40 minutes to explore it. It takes 10 minutes one-way to get to the actually center. So by the time you get there and see the churches visibly, it is time to leave. We tried to go in the churches but there was a 3 Euro cost to going in per person. We didn't feel 20 minutes was worth exploring. So we walked around, grabbed a Magnum ice cream bar and headed back to the boat. It was pretty but would have loved more time here.

Then we headed to Burano, which was the real highlight of this trip. The houses are painted different colors based on the family name and most of the families here were sailors. They also are known for their lace making, so we went into a lace-making shop and then we had plenty of free-time to walk around. I thought this was the best island for beauty and time we had to actually do things. There were a lot of neat shops here, so this made the whole trip worth it.

Then we headed back to Venice and this whole tour is about 4 hours. It was nice, but you can definitely do this tour on your own, but on a day the vaparettos are running! Then we headed to go eat dinner and we decided to do St. Mark's Square. We picked St. Mark's because we decided this would be the night we would splurge on our dinner and so we found this historical and neat restaurant. We sat inside and the nice band was outside but we could still hear them. This is the place where the waiters where the white tuxes. The drinks and food were expensive, but good! I recommend this place only if you want to splurge!

We decided we wanted to do a gondola ride and we went by the Hard Rock cafe area which is in the back corner of St. Mark's Square. It was 100 Euros and the price raised at 7pm compared to before where it was 80 Euros. They would take us to Rialto Bridge area and come back it would be about 35 minutes. It was wonderful and so romantic. We wanted to do our own ride but you can have up to 6 people. It was so nice. Our gondolier was funny, he would be talking to all the other gondoliers and then would bend down and give us some history. It was so beautiful and I highly recommend it!

After we were done, we took a walk to the Carnival vaparetto shuttle point and jumped on! It was a nice sunset trip back to the boat. The lines were not as bad on the way back. It was a great day, my favorite day, in Venice. My husband also really enjoyed this day and thought Venice was romantic as well.

Next up: Messina, Siciliy!