Oh the Places You'll Go...Stop 1, Venice!

On September 3rd, my 3 friends and I took off for the trip of a lifetime. We began 16 days of whirlwind travel around Europe! Our first stop was Venice, Italy. We flew from San Diego, to Philadelphia, to Rome then changed airlines to Alitalia and flew up to Venice.

The longest flight of my life, sitting for so long and trying to walk after that was an experience and arriving in Venice to beautiful weather and no luggage was just fantastic. Yes, 3 out of the 4 of us arrived in Venice but our luggage did not. No big deal. Somewhere when we transferred to Alitalia, our luggage made it onto another flight other than ours. So, after 3 hours at baggage claim, giving them our entire itinerary for our trip, giving them our hotel numbers, calling my mom from Venice and waking her up at 4:30am for my aunts info, which I had put in my bag but couldn't find it (don't worry, I found it later during the trip:), we got into Venice with our backpacks and ready to just deal with our lack of clothes. My desire for Venice was to see the beautiful old buildings, take in the first stop on our trip, eat some good food and just revel in the fact that we were in ITALY!

We got to our apartment where we were to spend 1 night, dropped off our stuff and got ready to go out. Part of our prep was to go out and find an outfit for the next day, since we didn't have any clothes. Once that was done, we hit the streets to walk our way to San Marcos square and get some food! We found a pizza place, that served a huge, fantastic pizza. And we of course had to find some gelato!

Venice was beautiful, the canals, the colors, the churches, the gondola's, the bridges, it was all right out of the pictures. The weather was perfect.





On Sunday, we headed to the islands of Murano and Burano to see the glass and lace produced out there. Murano was nice, the glass was beautiful, but I loved Burano. The houses were so colorful and fun. I loved that there were flowers in every window. Burano had some beautiful lace vendors and was just a fun place to walk around.

We caught the water taxi back to Venice and sat ourselves down at a cafe to eat wonderful pasta dishes!

It was so fun to site in the cafe and just watch people and eat good food. Of course we had to have gelato again:) We walked around the city some more and browsed the shops.


We went back to the hotel to pick up our stuff and check out so we could head to catch our bus up to Austria. On our way to the station, we were able to see the regatta, where the gondola's and other canal boats were going up and down the Grand Canal that runs in front of the station. It was a great ending to our Venice experience. (sidenote, we still don't have our luggage at this point, we were leaving Venice thinking we wouldn't see our luggage again and planning on purchasing an entire travel wardrobe in Austria).

We caught the bus that was taking us up to Klagenfurt Austria and my Aunt Kelly and Uncle Martin's home...