We moved today from our farm house in Tuscany near Siena to Venice. We drove to the train station in Florence, turned in the car at the rental office, and took the train (trena) to Venice. What a wonderful experience.
The train got up to about 90 mph at times, but you never felt the speed, except when passing another train going the other way...wow! The ride was smooth as silk and very quiet--you could actually hold a quiet conversation. The train made 5 stops along the way. On the way to the first stop, about half way to Balogna, the train rarely traveled above ground. That means that for most of the 40 miles we were actually in a tunnel. The rest of the trip was on the surface.
When we got to Venice we were greeted by a representative of the travel agency that arranged the trip and the hotel and we took a water taxi most of the way to the hotel. Unfortunately, we could not take the taxi all the way to the hotel because the America's Cup was using part of the Grand Canal for the yacht race. So we had to hoof it about a mile through the back streets accompanied by a porter who was pushing our luggage for us. We just missed seeing the sailing ships as they had just finished their last lap about 10 minutes before we arrived.
We only had a couple of hours to look around and have dinner, and it was raining. Our hotel is about 3 blocks from Piazza San Marco (Saint Mark's Square) so we walked there to look around. The square is about the size of 2 football fields and is bordered by a beautiful church and some beautiful stores and restaurants. String combos were playing a variety of music (mostly classical) at various spots along the perimeter. What an experience.
Tomorrow we have a walking tour of some of the sites, so I should have more to say then.
Hey, several people have told me there was an earthquake near Balogna early this morning. We didn't hear about it until we got off the train in Venice this afternoon. I got two emails about it wondering if we were ok.
Yes, we are ok. The news story I read said the quake was at about 4 AM. The funny thing is Pat and I both woke us at about that time this morning for no good reason. Maybe we felt the quake, but we were 80 miles away...who knows?
