2022-07-14: Paris to Venice

Today we head for Venice! We got ourselves up at 8:00am again this morning. After our normal routine of running through the shower and grabbing some breakfast in the hotel lobby, we went for one last walk in Paris. We headed down the street to one of the patisseries we enjoyed and grabbed one last round of macarons. They also had some hazelnut brittle that intrigued Darrell so he picked up some of that as well. We returned to our hotel room, grabbed our suitcases, and headed back down to the lobby. While we were checking out our taxi driver arrived which was perfect. We loaded our bags and ourselves into the taxi and headed for the Paris Orly airport.

Paris Orly is not the same airport we arrived at. We checked our bags at the EasyJet counter and headed through security. EasyJet sent an email the day before suggesting we be at the airport 2.5 hours prior to our flight. We were checked in and through security within 30 minutes. It was time to find somewhere to park for the next couple of hours. Good times… The terminal was quite crowded. We weren’t able to find four seats together unfortunately so we claimed a piece of floor by the windows overlooking the tarmac. We received a notification from EasyJet shortly afterwards letting us know our flight was delayed by about 25 minutes. Not a huge deal.

After patiently waiting in the terminal and overhearing a small family squabble, it was finally time to board our flight. We noticed that it seems to be customary to crowd the boarding area as soon as the plane arrives at the gate which is a little annoying. We didn’t approach the gate until they actually started boarding and, shockingly (sarcastic), we still made it on the plane. The plane took off without issue and about an hour and a half later, we were landing in Venice. We grabbed our bags from the baggage carousel and made our way to the water bus dock at the airport. Unfortunately, we just missed one of the boats so had to wait about half an hour for the next one. We boarded the boat and headed into Venice.

We rented an apartment through VRBO for our stay in Venice. We met our host at the Rialto water bus stop and he showed us to our apartment. His name was Andrew and he was very pleasant. He gave us an overview of the apartment and gave us a few restaurant and market suggestion before he was on his way. We spent a few minutes getting familiar with the apartment and then decided to grab some dinner. It was about 6:00pm at this point and we hadn’t grabbed lunch today. The kids had some snacks that they munched on during the flight.

We wandered the streets of Venice and came across St. Mark’s Square. After checking it out for a few minutes, we continued on and stopped to look at the menu of one of the restaurants. The resaurants have their menus posted on the windows out front. One of the waiters was outside trying to convinced people to come eat at the restaurant. He was very friendly and joked with the kids a bit so we decided to give the restaurant a try. We had some bruschetta to start and then Darrell and Patrick had spaghetti alla carbonara, Michael had some fried calamari, and Amanda had taglietti with scallops and zucchini. The food was quite good except that Michael didn’t like the polenta that came with his calamari.

After dinner, we wandered a little more searching for some gelato for dessert and ended up back in St. Mark’s Square. We wandered over the grand canal and enjoyed the sights there for a few minutes before continuing our search. We found some gelato on the other side of the square and returned to our apartment for the night.