What an amazing 11 days! Okay, well they weren't ALL amazing! I have to say that the Red Eye flight is not a lot of fun....especially after you've been up 24 hours or more! And even when it's not the Red Eye, just during the day and they have you sit in a HOT airplane, ON THE GROUND, for an hour and 1/2 and make you miss your connecting flight home......okay, I won't complain!! I just got to go on a virtually FREE (except for water!) vacation (thanks to Auto Owners and the hard work of my husband)!
April 29th we left at 7am from the Boise Airport to Chicago. From there we were supposed to go to Philadelphia, but that was during the tornados, so that flight was cancelled. They got us on a flight straight to Munich, Germany and from there to Venice, Italy! Sounds harmless...except they lost my luggage! (along with about 20 other couples from the Auto Owners group!)
Well, oh well... I'm in Venice!! Who wouldn't want to be in Venice?? Maybe a world class swimmer who needs to train for the olympics!! cuz even tho you are SURROUNDED by water on all sides and in the middle, you wouldn't DARE to touch it! eeewwwww! it is NASTY water! That would be because there are 150 islands around venice. Most are man made islands - basically they are floating on the water. I won't go into details. If you don't know how it was made you should look it up on Wikipedia!! It's interesting!! But basically, the water is their sewer! And we took a Gondola ride in it!
Venice is full of very rich heritage and history. The architecture and the art is amazing! We had tours one day of St Marks square and all the political and religious buildings. It was fun to see, but Scott and I aren't really into the really touristy things. So later, we ended up walking to the other side of Venice, where the REAL people live. It was much prettier, and quaint. I think that is a good word for it. It was fun to see.
We spent 3 days in Venice. The first one was recovering from Jet Lag. The second was touring and getting to know a few of the people in our group, and the 3rd was packing and getting ready to board our CRUISE SHIP!! This trip was one that Scott earned from Auto Owners. There were about 100 other couples with us from Auto Owners. We got to know many people and made some really great friends!
So we got there Thursday, and boarded the Ship on Sunday. It was a HUGE ship! We had an outside cabin so we could see the ocean! We even had a balcony with 2 chairs to sit out on. It was a little to chilly for me. I would go out to look then usually come right back in!!
The Ports we stopped at were great! The cruise itself was (sorry to say) a little bit of a letdown! Just not the kind of cruise we had heard about. Okay, like endless food, and endless ice cream, and food at midnight, and food anytime we wanted, and amazing food. Okay, are we spoiled or what?? So the food wasn't that great....atleast we didn't gain 20 pounds like some people have said they've done on cruises!! No, instead of eating, we worked out instead!!
So our first stop was Bari, Italy. It is just this little old town, built before Christ, definately not meant for cars, but there are a million of them all over!! Scott and I saw bicycles for rent when we got there. We thought that would be fun so asked if we could rent them. We had to go on their tour, but it was worth it. There was just 4 of us. 2 guys, Clint and Chris from Georgia. It was fun to get to know them. The strangest thing was just that these tiny little cars would go down these even tinier streets and we would have to get into a doorway so as not to be smeared along the wall!!
