We spent a leisurely last morning at at our Lido palazzo. Jill and Sherry will be going to China to present some staff development to teachers there, so they worked on the material they would be presenting. I worked on editing photographs. The wonderful thing about modern photography is how easy it is to take a dozens and dozens of pictures on any day. The miserable thing about modern photography is trying to sort through and edit those same pictures.
I made a push for us to take our final boat ride in Venice on line number two. It is usually the most crowded of the vaporetti routes as it goes up the Grand Canal, but I knew that because it starts in Lido we could get good seats if we wanted on it. And because is also ends at the railroad station it was an even more perfect choice for us. We pushed to get aboard with at the dock with all the queuing graces of French tourists, and having shoved a near mountain of suitcases into one corner of the ship, grabbed seats on bow. The trip indeed was glorious, but I having packed my camera away in my baggage I have only my memories to show for it. Sigh.
Italy has some remarkably good trains. I used to think that all European trains were wonderful, but my adventures last year on both the Croatian and Swedish railways were so awful that they made me think Amtrak was great. The Italian Frecce trains are clean, fast, and invariably on time. I insisted that we buy business class tickets, as I have learned on trains that paying just a little bit more makes the experience vastly more tolerable. And indeed we had wonderful seats in a quiet car. Well, it was as quiet as it could be with our group in it….
We are en route to Lake Como, but we needed to spend the night in Milan before heading out. There is not that much to see in Milan, particularly after Venice, but it is a lively enough city and both clean and safe by Italian standards. We are staying at an apartment we found on Airbnb. It is not expensive, but still not quite worth the limited amount we paid. The air conditioning does not work well, and the shower does not work at all.
In the evening we went to the center for dinner and some shopping. This is not a group that is interested much in seeing churches, so I did not bother taking them through the Duomo, probably the most historically important building in the city. Instead I took them through the famous arcade. John arranged dinner for the six of us in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the cathedral.
Tomorrow morning we get our car and head off to the mountains!
