Our final bike ride of the trip began at 8 and we were glad for the early start since it was already 90 outside! Today’s ride was a 20km out and back loop around the hotel. It was mostly flat with a few hills where we had lovely views of the vineyards.
As always, our Backroads trip was excellent. We had plenty of healthy exercise (but not too much since we (except Charlie) had e-bikes), breathed fresh air, saw the beautiful countryside from Parma to Verona, smelled flowers, flowering trees and a few cows, ate too much Italian food, drank Italian wine and learned about the culture of this ancient area of Italy.
After the last ride we climbed on the bus for Venice’s Marco Polo airport. It took about 20 minutes to walk from our bus drop off point to the water taxis. Charlie is leaving us here so he found public bus 5 and headed to his hotel for the night while we found the speedy water taxis and headed in to Venice, along the Grand Canal to the Foscari Palace Hotel, our home until Tuesday. This is the view from our dock.
We rested a bit in the very cold and welcome air conditioning and began exploring Venice.
Charlie let us know he was at a cafe in St. Mark’s Square so we wound our way across canals, down alleyways and in and out of shops until we found him. We looked around there for a few minute and traced our steps to Trattoria del Cuore di Venezia which we had seen earlier. We were treated with a spritz (from Wikipedia: The Spritz is a wine-based cocktail commonly served as an aperitif in Northeast Italy. The drink is prepared with prosecco wine, a dash of some bitter liqueur such as Aperol, Campari, Cynar, or, especially in Venice, with Select.) from the proprietor and I enjoyed the best lasagna I’ve had on the trip.
Charlie went to find the vaparetto (water taxi) back to his hotel and his flight home tomorrow. We wound our way back through the alleyways and across canals to the Foscari Palace. A needed early night for all of us!
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