When I Said I Wanted to Stay Longer in Venice, This Isn't What I Had in Mind

I cannot reiterate how much I love Venice.  We traveled into the city in style today in the only way appropriate for Venice:  by boat.

Unfortunately, after our epic arrival, everything seemed to start going wrong.

First of all, I couldn't find my wallet.  I knew the only place I put it is in my purse, but regardless I checked through my backpack several times and still could not find it.  I notified one of the chaperones, who instinctively thought I might have been pick-pocketed.  Now, we'd been in Venice for a total of five minutes.  I was pretty sure I hadn't been pick-pocketed.  But I was slowly freaking out.  My wallet is my life.  It's not only my money and my credit card, but my driver's license, my Millersville ID, my spare car key...everything.  My gut thought was that I left it in the hotel room, which is something I'd totally do.  One of the chaperones got on calling the hotel for me to check.

Meanwhile, we were waiting to get into St. Mark's Basilica, which had an approximately 45 minute line.  The line would have been obnoxious ordinarily, but my thoughts were elsewhere so I was glad I wasn't missing anything.  I overheard the chaperones muttering about some other unforeseen hiccup in our day, something about having to go back to the hotel, but they wouldn't tell us about it just yet.

Waiting in line to get into St. Mark's Basilica

Thankfully the hotel called back and told me that yes, I'd left my wallet in my room.  Crisis averted.

St. Mark's was a beautiful church.  I still can't believe that I actually walked right by THE St. Mark's remains.  The other really cool thing about the church was its floor; over the years as the island sank a little, the floor became warped and uneven.  Kind of scary, but very cool.

St. Mark's Basilica

It seems as though my wishes to stay longer were heard and granted, but not in the way I'd wanted to stay at all.  Through some kind of misunderstanding, we'd left our luggage at the hotel and needed to go back and get it.  This meant we had to miss our walking tour of Venice, including a tour of Doge's Palace and a tour of a Glass Factory, which I'd really been looking forward to.

So we all gathered ourselves onto a boat (Venice's version of a subway) and took it to Ferrovia, took the train back to the hotel, gathered up our belongings, and took the train back into Venice.  We missed our tours, but we changed our train time so that we would leave around 4:00 instead of 12:45.  As annoying as this all was, I couldn't complain too much because it was kind of like a blessing in disguise for me.  I got to go back and get my wallet, while still getting extra time in Venice.

Turns out I did get to ride through the waterway on a boat...just not a gondola!

I used my extra time to go get lunch and shop.  Lunch consisted of some much-needed wine (cheaper than water and soda!) and pizza and ravioli that I split with Hannah. Yum. Yum. Yum.  Let me just say that real Italian pizza is da bomb (yes, I did just resort to that level of corniness. It was that good.).  The shopping was also amazing.  I got a lot of my souvenirs out of the way, and found Venetian glass jewelry, which is gorgeous (even if we didn't get to see the factory).

Pizza and ravioli!

I'd like to think that we took a stressful and disgruntling situation and made a positive, relaxing afternoon out of it.  I was in a much better mood by the time we all packed onto our first-class cars on the train and headed off to Rome.

Until next time.