Another poor night of sleep due to noisy neighbors. I don’t think they sleep. I think our neighbors may actually have been vampires. I never saw them during the day. Just sayin!

The mosquito evaded us until the end. My bite count is up to 7. Two fresh, new ones from Cortina where we are now. Apparently mosquitos are an issue here. We are looking up a pharmacy to pick up some bug itch cream and repellent for tomorrow. This is beginning to become a theme for us, every trip visiting a pharmacy for Lisa. Last time was in Australia in 2020, but I’m pretty sure that was COVID now looking back at it.

Speaking of COVID, we are still healthy *knock on wood* although every day I wonder if it is suddenly going to hit. Hopefully it doesn’t! We are officially done with extremely crowded touristy areas. The last two weeks we will be in the alps.

This morning we packed up our apartment in Venice. While initially being a little disappointed, we ended up really loving the place and appreciating its location. I think the three flights of stairs after dragging our luggage for a mile made it hard for us to love the place on first sight.

I want to mention that this trip we did things a little differently and are using booking.com for all our hotels. We did this because we wanted to have free cancellation in the event something came up. One cool thing about the app is that we can communicate with our hotel through it like text messaging. This has been really helpful because it auto-translates the messages. This meant we have been able to easily get help when we needed it.

Anyway, after packing up we caught a water bus that was extremely packed and then caught a train that was less packed and then walked a fair distance to drop off all of our bags in our car. I forgot to mention that when we were walking in the really touristy areas of Venice there were many ramps over staircases. So Venice is trying to be more wheelchair friendly, they just weren’t where we were going on Saturday.

After we dropped off our bags, we headed back to the train and then back to the water bus. This water bus was also extremely packed. It was so hot and muggy and with a mask on, it was almost unbearable but we made it to Murano and hopped off!

Murano is an island known for glass-making. There were many beautiful displays of this art all over the place and many beautiful shops. Although going through my photos I realized I didn’t take any pictures of any of them….We walked around admiring the glass art and then I worked up an appetite so it was time to stop for a snack. I told Jacob to take a picture of me with my salami sandwich.

About this time our AirBnB host was messaging us asking when we would be arriving. Although this place was described as “self-check-in” we had to meet with Francesca to pay tourism fees.

We walked back to the water bus and boarded to a delightfully less crowded water bus for our journey back to the train station. Then again on the train, to the parking garage… We were both melting from the heat and looking forward to being in our nice air conditioned vehicle.

After I posted the blog yesterday, we went to a pizza place right around the corner from us and picked up a giant calzone and giant slice of pizza. We split these as our final dinner in Venice. It was delicious and filling and exactly what I needed at the end of a very long, hot day.

Our drive to Cortina was mostly uneventful, but we got to enjoy some of the famous Italian driving. Several drivers looked like they were changing lanes but then they stopped about half-way through and went back to their lane. I saw a semi-truck driver texting and it looked like he was going to careen off a bridge. He was at least four feet over the line and nearing the barrier of the bridge. At one point, the lanes disappeared entirely and it was utter chaos. Then the lanes magically appeared again. We had several drivers tailgate us and then pass in non-passing zones and then we got stuck behind a driver going 40 km under the speed limit. Jacob did an excellent job navigating us to Cortina.

Cortina d’Ampezzo is a beautiful mountain town. The 1956 Olympics were held here. We believe the building we are staying in hosted Olympians but we are going to try and confirm that tomorrow. Cortina will also host the 2026 Winter Olympics. After driving the extremely narrow, windy roads up here we are a little curious how that will work with all the extra traffic. I counted at least four cranes working on buildings in the area. The classic 1981 James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, features Cortina prominently throughout. Speaking of James Bond, we saw a few locations from the film Casino Royale while in Venice.

We are here in Cortina for the next five days. Below is a view from our balcony. We were greeted by Francesca who was very lovely and energetic and had lots of good information for us. We parked our car in the garage below the building and are all settled in to our new space.

Tomorrow we are going to get some laundry done, walk around town and start planning for the rest of our time here.

Until then!