Throw Kim & Annie from the train.

This weekend Annie and I visited Venice, or as the Italians decided to rename it, Venezia. It was beautiful and despite all of the water in the city, it did not rain. Apparently, it only rains in Genova.

Anyway, we've become pretty confident in several things. One of the things we do best is travel. We can purchase tickets for the bus, train, and even rent a car! No problema. So, Saturday morning we take the bus to the train station and purchase our train tickets to Venice. We are relaxing in our little train cabin with four other passengers. The train officer guy comes by and yells at Annie for having her feet up on the seat across from her. She understands and puts her feet down. Talk about being on a power trip. About 30 minutes later, the little dude returns and asks for our tickets. Everyone hands him their tickets while I'm digging in my purse for ours. I proudly hand him our ticket and he inspects it then looks at us and says something that I cannot understand at ALL. Yikes. I don't understand, I say. He speeds up his Italian, repeats what he says, sounds angry, ads more that we can't understand, and stares at us. I decide to inspect the tickets and Annie and I agree that our entire ticket is indeed right there in my hands. I mean, we've done this several times before. We are proficient at ticket buying. The four people in our car are graciously trying to help us. They speak very, very little English (about like our Italian I would say). This is the FIRST time we've been in this situation. We have no idea what's going on, no one can explain it to us, and there's a scary guy with a big mole on his face staring at us. After a few minutes, the little man leaves. Hmmm....are we safe? Are we about to be tossed from a moving train? We have no idea. We pull out the dictionary and begin talking with our cabin buddies. We finally understand what happened! We apparently only had two of our three ticket stubs. We didn't wait long enough for the last one to be printed....even though it looks complete and we've always only received two. Like I said, we're pros at this stuff now. The man comes back and says more that we don't understand. The lady in our car says that we're okay until we get to Milan (where we're switching trains), then we'll have to talk to the captain of the next train. Well, we have less than 15 minutes to switch trains and talk to the captain in a language we can barely speak. The nice lady in our cabin says she's going to Venice too and will help us. She does and the captain acts like he could care less that we're on the train. He barely even looks at our tickets and we're safe. Whhheewwww....talk about a stressful situation.

So, we arrive in Venice and left the train incident behind us. We did however, have a hotel incident. Basically, we hadn't planned to stay the night in Venice but decided last minute that we would. We had no hotel but tourist season is supposedly over. It's about 11 pm and we decide to start looking for a room. We went to at least 9 different hotels before we found the smallest hotel room ever. The front desk man gave us a break in the price and we took the room. We flipped a coin for the bed and Annie ended up on the floor. We actually slept better than either of us had in awhile...probably because we weren't in Genova.

Despite these minor and fairly entertaining events, we had a marvelous time in Venice. It is a very romantic place in every sense of the word.

Here are my pictures from Venice.