Trip to Venice

I guess it was Tuesday when we left Spoleto and started on our way to Venice. We saw lots of lovely countryside along the way. We had a small detour off the main road but that was okay because Mike got to see mountains of clay shale, the kind that he based his geotechnical dissertation on for his PhD. We made a brief stop in Ravenna and visited a very old Byzantine church with some amazing stone work and mosaics. Although the entry fee was a bit overpriced. Ravenna was a lovely city with everyone riding their bicycles along the sidewalks. We then continued to Venice where we should have arrived in about two hours but instead because of the poor signs along the highways and roads, along with a detour into the fog covered, dark, isolated prostitute ridden back roads we finally arrived at the boat docks four hours later, only to find that the boat we needed to take was on strike! Mike says he has yet to come to Italy when he did not encounter a strike with some means of transportation. At first we understood the lady to say all boats were on strike, that would have been disastrous so when we found we would just simply have to walk a greater distance with our luggage I was relieved. We crossed San Marco square, lovely and quiet late at night and crossed about four bridges with our luggage, (glad I packed light)we arrived at Hotel Residenza. We circled it once since we could not find how to enter to return to the door and searched for the hidden door bell in the lions mouth. Okay by now we are hungry, frustrated, cold and tired. The lady at the hotel seemed very glad to see us because she had to stay late waiting on our arrival. Both of us were very surprised when we found out that we were not the couple she was waiting on and that we had the WRONG hotel! AHHHHH! My fault, I had made the reservation at a different hotel than we had planned. The hotel where our reservation was all the way across the city near the train station. It didn't take much convincing by Mike for us to just forget that reservation and stay where we had arrived. Luckily they had room for us. Only the life is expensive! We feel asleep hoping for a better day tomorrow.