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Published: September 10th 2008
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Our latest adventure was awesome. We had the best time ever. We decided to get a pretty serious holiday in before uni starts in 3 weeks so decided to head for Italy. Jess planned for hours and hours to find the cheapest of everything, hostels, trains, buses, the works.
Day 1We left for Venice via Villach (the bottom of Austria), a three hour train trip between each stop. When we hopped on the train from Villach bound for Venice the train was absolutely packed and a family of 7 were trying to kick out the 2 people we thought were sitting in our seats. All the seating was reserved, so we were happy when the ticket inspector started walking towards us as we thought she would soon clear up the seating mess as the train was already moving. Andrew quickly double checked the tickets, looked at me and said, "Jess what’s the date?" We had boarded the train a day early, our tickets weren't valid and there was not a spare seat on the train....fun fun! We explained the situation to the ticket inspector and were allowed to stay on the train, but we had no seats. After recovering from
a minor heart attack we discovered that the train had an empty restaurant carriage so we sat in there for the trip drinking coffee, orange juice and beer so they wouldn’t kick us out.
3 hours later the language had changed and we were in Venice!!
We arrived at our accommodation - Camping Jolly (on the mainland, Venice Mestre) at about Midday and they luckily had room for us that night as we hadn’t booked for then. To celebrate we headed straight for their pool.
After about an hour of swimming we headed into Venice and walked the streets for a few hours. It was very beautiful and we had a great time cruising the streets that are randomly set out and very maze-like.
We arrived back at our room to find the 2 most annoying Irish girls you could possibly meet. It was one of the hottest nights I can remember, so they decide to shut all the doors and windows so there is absolutely NO airflow at all - and then complain all night how hot it was!! We appropriately named them “take a breath”
(didn’t stop talking) and “ass bend” (didn’t stop bending over in her
Gondola Galore
Not so cheap for a ride on one....... white shorts, with stripy undies).
Day 2 of Venice was the day we were supposed to arrive so we allowed ourselves a day off and spent the whole day at the hostel’s pool. Yippeeeee.
Day 3 back into Venice to explore some of the islands off Venice including Murano (home of Venetian glass) and Lido (you’ve got to put down the Lido if you want to play the saxophone). Came across a great beach in Lido that was packed with people, had some cool couch type beds set out in the sand. Travelling between islands and around Venice was on big boats used as taxis
Day 4 Venice is quite an expensive city and we couldn’t really afford to roam the city and surrounding islands for another day, so instead we spent another day relaxing by the pool! We had too much fun showing off our awesome handstanding skills to the locals and bombing each time the lifeguard fell asleep!
Day 5 We left Venice just after 9am, swapped trains in Florence at about 12.30 and arrived in Pisa at about 2pm. We thought we may have arrived a bit earlier, but missed the 1st connecting
Beach at Lido (Island) Venice
and jess is holding lunch, 2 plain rolls :) train in Florence. We were due to leave Pisa for Rome at 5pm, so we were feeling a little pressed for time. We headed straight out of the train station, took a quick glance at a nearby town map, and headed in the direction we thought the leaning tower was in. After power walking for about 15 mins we found the tower - and hundreds of tourists holding it up!! We were pretty happy with our navigational skills - we knew how to go straight. Pisa was very pretty and we cruised around for about an hour and a half before we started back to the train station.
We arrived in Rome at about 8.30pm and after another short train ride to the outskirts, spent the next hour roaming the streets trying to find our accommodation - this time we really could have used a map. The directions we were given from the hostels website were wrong - if only it were just straight. It was really dark and hard to find anything so we asked a few Italians for directions (consulted two ladies who in turn went in and asked a restaurant owner, then we asked 4 drunken bums
Camping Jolly, Venice
Check out the sleeping lifeguard - in red in the background. Andrews handstand isn't too bad either with pizza, 1 who had been to the gold coast and wants to go back) however they all spoke next-to-no English, and one guy thought the word for their right hand was left. Luckily Andrew’s 2 terms of Italian lessons in year 7 came in handy and we eventually found “Hostel Peter Pan” (awesome name) at about 10pm. This was the first but definitely not the last time we learnt the lesson that it’s stupid to go to a new country without any maps - who would have thought?
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mothermapes
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Invite me along anytime - you know how I love maps!