Love

I'd heard before I left that there were two responses to visiting Venice: people who fell in love with it or people who felt it was overrun with tourists, smelly, and overrated. I feared I'd fall into the second category, but I'm happy to report I'm firmly in the first. I love Venice. I find it charming, and historic, and touristy (in a good way). Yes, piazza San Marco is crowded with tourists (as is most of that area), but it's easy to escape the worst of the crowds and find what makes the city so appealing.

Today we toured churches, and tomorrow is our museum day. Both days will include lots of wandering around, finding random streets, canals, cafes, plazas, etc. we also took the Rick Steve's Grand Canal boat tour today, with our water bus happily missing all of the smaller taxis, gondolas and private boats in its way. It's definitely a well used canal!

Tonight, we got to participate in the Worlds Largest "Cheers" sponsored by Aperol. Drinks were terrible but experience was fun.

Ciao!

Venice!

After a long night/day of travel, we've arrived in Venice. Pizza, wine, wandering down tiny streets and over canals. Euro cup soccer, with a victory for our current home country. We're off to a good start.

And we're off!

Hello loyal blog readers!

Welcome back to another of the Polich family adventure blogs.  We've had to leave the Monkeys (and monkeys, giraffes, elephants, etc) behind this time, but we are excited to be getting a little bit of international soccer by hitting the tail end of the Euro 2012 soccer tournament in Europe.  Sadly, no games in person for us, but we will get to watch the Italy-Germany game in Italy on Thursday.  Hopefully it helps us fight jet lag to stay awake for it, and hopefully the crowd won't be too hostile as we root for the Germans instead of the Azzurri.

Erin has already started her journey, with a few days sojourn in the Swiss Alps around Lake Geneva.  She is scouting out Milano for us, and Beth and I leave tomorrow to join her.  We're not so excited about our middle economy/coach seats on the way there (and jealous that our parents are flying business class as I type this), but we'll put up with a few hours of discomfort for what is sure to be a fantastic journey.

We won't spend any time in Milan on this end of the trip, saving it for the finale.  Our plan is to hop in our car and drive straight to Venice when we arrive on Thursday.  Keep your fingers crossed for us that we actually get the automatic car we've reserved.  Otherwise, the Budget rental car's clutch is in for a rough ride.

We'll keep the blog updated as we can, with pictures and stories.  All depends on how kind wifi is to us across Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia.

Ciao (for now)!