April 11: on the road to Lido and Venice

We left Florence realizing that we needed a lot more time here, but at least with some appreciation of how much time that would require.

Next time.  After I get out of debtor prison.

We woke to a drizzle.  Packed up, and the rest headed out in search of sustanance while I guarded the luggage and retrieved the car, which miraculously appeared from God knows where. 

Our escape from Florence was far less dramatic than our seemingly endless search for our hotel upon arrival.  We now have a running joke, taken from Chevy Chase in the movie European Vacation, in which he can't get out of a loop around Parliament and Big Ben.  "LOOK KIDS!! PARLIAMENT AND BIG BEN!!" as with each circuit he gets more maniacal.  I have actually never seen the movie, but Judy and Liz were teasing me with that as we arrived.  It is a lot funnier now.  Not so much on our third circuit around the train stazionne a couple of days ago.

So we left in the rain, drove through the rain, arrived in the rain, took the ferry from the mainland to Lido in the rain, looked in vain for the hotel in the wrong place based on the wrong directions in the rain, and finally found the hotel in an incredibly obvious place.  In the rain.  Unloaded the car in the rain, checked in in the rain, and got into our room.  And the rain stopped.  Then we went out looking for food.  The restaurant that our hotel desk clerk sent us to turned out to not be open, but we found something kind of OK and got a good walk around Lido.
Lido is the buffer between old Venice and the Adriatic.  It is a narrow strip of land and is (I think) the only one of the 130-something islands of Venice that allows cars.  For a price. The ferry to Lido charges per car and per person, and a car with 4 is 50 Euro each way.  In actuality, it wasn't a bad deal.  Parking at the terminal is 35 Euro, and you have to schlep a ton of bags (in our case) on various  boats, buses, etc to your hotel. 

Our hotel manager was a sweet guy, and he told me about a place a couple of blocks away where I could park for free.  Score!  Anyway, we were able to unload at the front door, park, and not worry about the car (or its bills) for the rest of our time in Venice.

So we ate, had some more gelato (which is uniformly pretty amazing), went to bed, and hoped for the best.