Our gondola ride

Last night treated ourselves to a gondola ride. Mr. Snootypurse and myself shared a pre-gondola dinner while watching boats pass back and forth through the lagoon. As you can see, Mr. Purse is winding up to deliver a stiff right hook. Too much togetherness, I guess.

We started our ride around 9:00pm which was just about perfect. We had some twilight starting out and things were almost completely dark as we finished up. I enjoyed the ride more than I expected. It’s so quiet and peaceful as you glide along Venice’s back canals. Quite a contrast to how things are during the day. And it is very romantic to share the experience with someone you love.

Benvenuti a Venezia

  
We arrived in Venice a couple of days ago. The weather has been quite hot and humid and temperatures remind me of Hawaii. We parked the car in the Tronchetto garage and arrived at our hotel by vaporetto (water bus). We are staying in a clean one-room apartment close to St. Mark's Square. It's sparsely furnished but is quiet and air-conditioned. It's associated with a hotel so we have the benefits of daily breakfast and concierge service.

Yesterday we toured the Accademia gallery. It was somewhat disappointing because they are renovating a few of the important rooms. They are in the process of moving the paintings to other rooms but this won't be complete until July 1 :-( We tried to view some modern art but this area is closed on Tuesdays. The nice thing was these streets weren't very crowded and there were some fun windows to peek into including wood sculptures of clothing and fabric.

In the afternoon, we toured the Doge's Palace. The middle picture is a photo of the courtyard. This complex served as the Capitol Building, White House, Supreme Court, and Sing Sing prison for the Venetian republic. It was a beautiful building jam-packed with art and exhibits. In retrospect we could have skipped the Accademia and spent more time here.

Austria and the Dolomites

On our route from Bled to Cortina, Italy we stopped at the Worther See in Austria to look around and grab some lunch. It was an interesting stop because although it was a large lake, it was built-up like a seaside resort. There was a Euro sportscar rally scheduled for the following day so we got several glimpses of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, etc racing by.

From Cortina we took the chairlift(s) to the top of Monte Cristallo. There are two lifts. One goes up to about 2000m and the second covers the additional 1000m up to the summit at 3000m. We took both lifts up to the summit where we snapped some photos. Unfortunately the camera failed its high altitude drop test.

It sounds trite but the photos don't do the area justice. The peaks are magnificent and rival any mountains we've seen in North America. The wooden building shown in the last picture is called a refugio. They are the Dolomite version of a ski lodge. We spent some time at this one sharing a light lunch and soaking in the views before hiking down the bottom half of the mountain.

A day of caves and bees

We drove to Postogna Caves today. This is a huge series of underground limestone caves in the Karst region of Slovenia. As a geography geek I wanted to see this example of Karst topology. The cave tour was quite an operation as they take you into the caves on a train/people mover. You walk for about 1km in the middle through the caverns before being transported out via train. The formations were stunning and unlike anything we've seen before.

Closer 'home' to Bled, we made a stop at the apicultural aka bee-keeping museum in Radovljica. It's hidden away in the town hall and is a tribute to the industrious species. They even have a working bee-hive in the museum. This is a picture of one of the fancier beehives on display. Apparently many bees in the U.S. are descended from Slovenian bees. No mention of colony collapse at the museum but Mr. Snootypurse reports reading about it somewhere along the line during our trip.

We will drive through Austria today on our way to Cortina Italy. I was struck last night on how strange it is to be traveling freely through the former Yugoslavia. Prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain these folks were the 'bad guys'. I can only hope that the future brings such peace to parts of the world that are under fire today.