These messages are from a series of e-mails written after our vacation to Paris and Italy, in the summer of 2002. The events recounted in this internet diary occurred on Thursday, June 27.
--Jim McQueen
On our last day in Venice, Nancy and I took the boys to the beach. We'd had enough of tourist sights, and the kids had been patient enough for a day off. The outer part of Venice is a barrier island named Lido -- I had thought that was the name of a famous nightclub or something. (Maybe it's both.)
Susan stayed in Venice and took a day off from us, and we took a vaporetto to Lido. That was a 15-minute boat ride, then a 15-minute walk across the narrow part of the island. The little beach community was three or four blocks wide. On the way, we posed for a picture in front of the Hungaria Palace Hotel, for Nancy's Hungarian friend Helen.
The guide books had told us that there were lots of great beaches on Lido, but that the closest ones were private beaches belonging to the resort hotels. The books said there were also public ones, and listed the Italian phrase telling us which beaches would let us in. We began walking past row after row of beaches, looking for the magic phrase.
We walked A LONG WAY without finding anything definite. At first, we could see the obvious connection between a hotel and it's beach, but an hour later we weren't so sure. Finally, in desperation and with a potential mutiny building, I parked the family and walked a couple of blocks to the next beach. I studied the sign by the entrance -- it still didn't have the phrase we'd been looking for -- then asked an attendant by the entrance if we could go to the beach. He turned out to speak good English, and ran down the fee schedule for renting a cabana.
The front row was 50 Euros for a day, which struck me as expensive, but we were in need of a pleasant experience to turn around a bad day. I fetched Nancy and the boys, and the attendant led us to an empty cabana. The kids made a beeline for the water.
The kids stayed in the Mediterranean as long as we let them. The water was warm, and the waves tiny. When they tired of swimming, they played in the sand, although we hadn't brought any beach toys. The morning had turned into a relaxing and much-needed break from our vacation.
Love,
Jim
The cabana on the Lido had an enclosed room to change in, kind of like a plastic tool shed. It had a small porch with chairs and an awning, where we spent most of the afternoon watching the kids swim. Each cabana had a small bucket that someone had filled with water, to dip your feet into to clean off the sand.
When it began to feel like lunchtime, Nancy left the beach to shop for food. She wandered into the small town behind the shore, and went into two or three little shops, gathering picnic materials. None of the storekeepers spoke English, but she'd point at what she wanted, and after a while she returned with lunch.
We called the kids up from the water, and had cheese and salami sandwiches. We had to tear the bread open to make the sandwiches, because we didn't have knives, or for that matter any tableware at all. Nancy had gotten soda for the boys, and I remembered how to open beer bottles on the door hardware.
After lunch, the boys resumed playing in the water and on the sand, and Nancy and I resumed doing nothing. A group of Italian kids near us had shovels and pails for a pretty good sand castle. Our kids hovered around the edges watching, and I was amused by the difference between the European tight-knit swimsuits, and Scott's California surfer-style suit.
Late in the afternoon we called the boys back from the water. There were showers behind the cabanas with warm, fresh water. We changed into dry clothes, and wrapped the bathing suits in extra towels that I had filched from the hotel maid's cart. The last photo has no particular point, other than to commemorate the LONG walk we had to repeat, to get back to our boat ride home.
Love,
Jim
The evening after our day at the beach, we had the only bad meal of our whole vacation. We didn't have any particular restaurant in mind, but thought it would be nice to try one of the touristy places with tables set outside along the Grand Canal. We sauntered along the canal, and came across a nice looking cafe, in the late sunlight of the summer evening.
The restaurant had a price-fixe menu posted, and when we began ordering from that, the waiter displayed a bad attitude about it. He wasn't overtly rude, but he seemed to pooh-pooh our choices. The food was probably fine when it arrived, but by then we had a bad taste in our mouths from the waiter. We ate and left quickly.
While we were waiting for the sun to go down, we considered having a drink at Harry's Bar, birthplace of Bellinis and Carpaccio. None of us really knew what a Bellini was, but we walked over there anyway. The bar turned out to be more formal-looking than we imagined, and we didn't think we'd feel comfortable in there with kids in tow. We looked at trinket booths near San Marco as dusk turned to dark.
It was our last night in Venice, and we had saved that evening for a gondola ride. There was a spot near our hotel where we'd always seen gondolas waiting, but when we wanted to hire one, naturally there were none around. We meandered through the maze of Venice, until we located several gondolas in a basin by a Best Western hotel.
All five of us took the same minimum ride -- about 45 minutes. It was fun watching the gondolier expertly row his long boat through the narrow passageways, avoiding other gondola traffic. His route took us briefly onto the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge, but mostly we glided quietly in small ancient canals, underneath apartment windows or behind restaurant kitchens. The gondolier pointed out a few sights, but the only one I remember was Marco Polo's house.
I'm glad we didn't pay extra to be serenaded.
Love,
Jim