Our Italian adventure is one of the craziest stories ever told (or about to be told right here in this blog) and yet it is 100% true (with a little hyperbole in the use of adjectives). We don't really expect people to believe it because we can hardly believe it ourselves, but here goes anyway...
We got up around 0800, showered in a bathtub with a hand-held nozzle thing and no shower curtain (try that for interesting!). After we got dressed and ready for the day, we headed out to find the bus. It was not that difficult, but we realized after a few stops that we got on going the wrong direction. So, we got off and had to take two busses to get back to where we started. The correct bus took us to the Milan city center, where we needed to catch bus 73, which would take us to the airpoort (where our rental car was awaiting us). However, since we had plenty of time, we walked around the city center for a while. It was really beautiful! There was this HUGE catherdral there and a indoor/outdoor mall that looked ancient, with mosaic floors and glass ceilings! We did not have too much trouble finding bus 73 and we made it to the airport with no hang-ups. Once we got to the airport, however, we had a whole new set of problems. We had not printed out the voucher and could not remember which company we had rented the car from... We checked with 5 different places before finding the right one. We got a little Fiat. It is the most adorable little car. I absolutely LOVE it. It is manual, so Catherine does the driving, which has worked out quite well so far (or course that leaves me in charge of the map and directions...).
We went back to the hostel (we got lost a few times, but eventually made it), picked up our stuff, and headed to Venice. Three and a half hours later we arrived at "The Island" and realized that parking is really expensive because there are no cars allowed on the island itself. So we drove back to the mainland, found some little neighborhood, where we parked the car on the street and hopped on a bus back to the island (more correctly, waited an HOUR in the freezing cold until the bus arrived and then got off to catch a second bus that took us right to where we wanted to go). We wandered the streets of Venice for four hours before we found the hostel we were to planning stay at... unfortunatley, they had no beds available, so we were back on the street again. We eventually left the island and found a place around midnight (that was after some random Italian guy offered us a place to stay at his house, but that is a story for another day). C talked the guy down to 55 euros for the night (down from 80) and he even gave us vouchers for an amazing buffet breakfast. I don't know how she does it!
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