As Joan said: Venice was beautiful! We had nice sunny days and evenings that were a little cool but comfortable. When we arrived we bought a 3 day pass on the water buses called Vaparettos, so we could hop off and on them all we liked.

We needed the Vaparetto to get to our hotel.

We took a tour of the Grand Canal (Rick Steeves Audio Tour) where we learned that through out history the ships would arrive to load and unload all their goods. Venice was considered the gateway between Europe and the Orient and became very wealthy through trade. Lots of imposing homes and castles.

The architecture reflects this mix of cultures with oriental ornamentation on gothic buildings.

We toured St. Marks Square called La Piazza San Marco in Italian. It's a huge square dominated on one side by St Mark's Basilica a huge cathedral that we also toured. There is so much to see and do in Venice that a few days just isn't enough!

We arrived in Piazza San Marco and it was like we had just joined the rest of the tourists touring Venice. Huge crowds taking pictures like lemmings, we couldn't see the bridge of sighs for all the people standing on it. And lines for everything to buy tickets , to buy trinkets, to buy talismen. We quickly escaped to Gardens north of the Piazza and wandered through the small residential neighbourhoods.

We stayed on Murano Island in a really nice little private hotel. The owners were a great couple and we conversed quite well with the help of google translate 😃

Our hotel was on the edge of one of the islands that makes up Murano and we had a glorious view of Venice and the Cemetery (an island between Venice and Murano.

Murano is where all the glass blowing factories are located and where they make all the beautiful Venusian Glass. We spent a few hours exploring that too!

And spending far too much money on Jewelry!

Thank you Joan for the narrative assist!

We were going to take the train to Venice, however when we went to buy the ticket it priced out at €180 from Nice to Venice.

With flights being €60 a person we figured it would be much cheaper and faster to fly.

We purchased our flights while we were in the train station, and as we walked away we realized our error, we had asked for two tickets from Nice to Venice, so they were only €90 each. Still not as cheap as the flight, but a much better price.

By taking the plane we saved about five hours, we were able to sleep in, check out around 10, take the train to the airport and then get a bus transfer from the Venice airport into the city.

There are two types of public transfers into the city bus transfer or water transfer and they are only only a few Euro difference in price, but the bus transfer was advertised with the three day Vaporetto ticket and I thought it was included in the price. It was €40 for a three day event for the ticket and €8 for the bus transfer into the city.

When we got out of the bus we were in the Piazzale Roma near the western end of the Grand Canal. A bridge over the Grand Canal, the Ponte degli Scalzi(or Ponte dei Scalzi) (English: Bridge of the Barefoot [Monks]), links the bus station on the sestiere of Santa Croce to the cities northernmost island where you will find the train station Venezia Santa Lucia. (Apparently, Not the station we were to leave Venice from, but more on that in a future blog post)

As it is with most things, the first thing you see is the first thing you believe. We arrived by the bus and the train terminal and so we thought this was the tourist centre of Venice. We got quite a surprise when we went over to Piazza San Marco. (More about that later!)

The first thing we did was hop on a vapparetto and head over to our hotel. Our hotel is in on the island of Murano. The glassware creation centre of Venice. The reasonable priced hotel turned out to be quite costly with all the jewelry being sold on the sidewalks to and from the door!