Summer Travel: The Venice Post

Venice. It was amazing, and everything I had hoped.

I really wasn’t sure how this was all going to go with our kids. I did my best with preparation and hoped for the best. And I’m happy to say that overall, we’re raising some great mini-travelers.

Our oldest is six and he was amazing. Although we had brought a stroller in hopes of being able to stay out late while the kids slept, what I didn’t realize about Venice is that every single bridge has steps up and steps down. Thousands of steps and hundreds of bridges. The stroller was a total flop. So the kids had to walk all day. Like, twelve hours a day. And they did. Kids can do a lot more than you think they can.

We stayed in a great little apartment about a ten minute’s walk from Saint Mark’s square and in an actual residential area, which is harder to find than you’d expect.

The smartest thing we did was purchase Kids Go Europe: Treasure Hunt Venice. Although our younger child was a bit too young to get into it, our six-year-old was totally into it! It’s a treasure hunt. You earn points by going places, learning things and doing things. Points add up for pizza stops, gelato breaks, and souvenir purchases. How else would a child that young be super excited to get into a basilica or find out what the winged lions symbolized?

We also expected him to keep a travel journal over the summer so that we didn’t make any backwards steps in writing. We chose Kids’ Travel Journaland it was just right for him. A little bit of research before we left, daily descriptions of things we did saw and ate, and a bit of debriefing at home. That picture above is him writing in his journal in Saint Mark’s Square. It looks like that guy on the left thought it was a good picture, too!

Oh, the gelato! Our favorite was the hazelnut flavor, which was kinda like eating frozen nutella. Lovely! And the coffees and pizza and trips to the panetteria…

That was actually one of our missions on the scavenger hunt. Find a panetteria and find out what they sell. Imagine their delight when they found out!

And of course there’s the gondolas.

Riding down the Grand Canal on a gondola is something I will never, ever forget. Such an amazing experience!

Here’s some Venetian trivia: The city of Venice has numbered every door or any space that once was a door. So you might be walking along one of those tiny alleys and see a random space of wall with a numbered address.

My daughter loved Venice. What was her favorite part? The pigeons. And the butterflies. Oh, and the “men on the stairs that sold the ball that splattered when they threw it down”.

I took this picture because it looked like a histogram. I’m a photo nerd, I know.

There’s a free wifi spot on the foot of the Ponte de l’Academia, right by this spot. You’re welcome.

And Saint Mark’s Square at night? Magical. The music, the lights, the atmosphere. Wonderful.

And because I had a hard time limiting the pictures in this post, here’s a slideshow, because I’m sappy like that. And in case you’re curious, that’s the Sound of Sunshine, the Italian version that we heard over and over again while we were in Italy. We also heard a lot of Cee Lo’s F*** You, the not so nice version, but this one just seems nicer.(Good thing the kids never picked up on that! My husband and I gave each other shocked looks and played it cool while they were performing a live cover right outside our hotel.)

So anyway, there’s a slideshow embedded here. And if you’ve made it this far, thank you! Hopefully our Vipiteno pictures will be up soon enough!