July 13, 2015

We arrived in Venice yesterday afternoon and camped right outside of the city for the night.  First thing this morning, we got up and got ready so that we could catch the first shuttle into the city this morning.  Based on the cost of Venice, we decided to make this a quick trip and only spend today in the city before heading out.  By the end of the day, we were pretty happy with our decision.  While it is an amazingly cool city, there wasn’t really much of interest for Hayden and everything was pretty expensive.

We got to the city and decided to just walk our way from one side to the other.  Because of the mix of canals and roads, it’s pretty easy to get lost!  We spent some time wandering up and down little alley ways and across canals that I’m sure we had already been through, but it was fine because we just wanted to meander around anyway!  We came across a couple of really neat looking churches, but since we were lost, I have no idea which ones they were!  lol

The highlight of the day for Hayden was going into a Leonardo DaVinci exhibit that they had set up in one of the local churches.  It is a traveling exhibit that shows models of many of his inventions and talks about his life and all of the things that he accomplished.  It actually ended up being a really cool stop for us!  We spent at least an hour going through everything and it gave us an awesome opportunity to talk about how math and science are important for inventing.  Hayden was totally enthralled with it and has decided that he is going to build a bunch of the machines when we get back home.

We did a little more wandering after the DaVinci exhibit, but finally made our way to St. Mark’s Square.  We had read ahead of time that you can feed the birds here, so we stashed some of our bread from lunch to give to the pigeons.  Hayden was in pigeon heaven!  It seems like he is always wanting to chase the birds anytime we go anywhere, so this was his chance to get up close and personal.  You could put some bread in your hand and the birds would come right on to you to eat it.  He would have stayed here for hours, but we ran out of bread!  🙂

We didn’t actually go into the museums in the square (we saw a ton of museums in Italy and decided we could save a few bucks here), so we hung out here in the square for a while before making our way back to the train station.  We intended to take a gondola back, but it was $90 for a 30 minute ride…CRAZY!!!  (Yes, we’re cheap)  We couldn’t quite justify the expense, so we went with the water taxi which still got us some great pictures from the water.  Once we got going, we were glad we didn’t bother paying for the gondola because they were paddling right in the sun with no type of shade and it was HOT!

Once we made it back to the train station, we had a little while to kill, so we went for our old stand-by…ICE CREAM!  We found a place where you can make your own ice cream bar and it was AMAZING!!  You pick your ice cream, then pick the type of chocolate coating (white, milk, or dark), then you get to pick 3 toppings that go on the ice cream bar.  They make it right there…they were so stinking good!  I could have eaten at least 2 or 3 of them if I wasn’t sure they had about 800 calories in each one.  🙂

We are taking the overnight train to Vienna tonight, so hopefully we will get there in the morning refreshed and ready for a new country!