Greetings all!
Today was the last day of the Country Heritage tour that started this whole excursion.
I’ll get to all the fun stuff we did today in a bit, but I want to thank Jenn Stefoni and the Country Heritage Tours crews for their amazing work. These sorts of tours are pricey, there’s no doubt, but that’s fine—if they do their job and these guys did.
We stayed at great hotels. The only one that wasn’t to our taste was the Hilton in Milan, and that was because it was normal, high quality U.S. level of hotel. The Hotel Victoria in Turin was Old World and that was our favorite. The Hotel Barchetta Excelsior in Como was 60s/70s Old World in a fantastic spot. The Hilton Molino Stucky is the best of what Hilton can be. That’s a great set of choices and all of them provided tasty breakfasts, excellent dinners, and good wines. What more could we ask for.
Every day was some new adventure guided by Jenn. I won’t go into them here, but she never stopped looking for fun things to do. She had all of our transportation arranged and it was smooth as silk.
Basically, for the last 10 days, Jenn made our lives wonderful. I can’t recommend Country Heritage Tours enough.
OK, on to today. Did I mention Jenn never stopped looking for fun things to do? I said something about wanting to go into St. Mark’s Basilica here in Venice but I’d been too slow to get tickets. Jenn made it happen, and with a tour guide.
St. Mark’s is something else. Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance all melded into something awe-inspiring. Believe me, you want to go there. If not, you’ll want to see my pictures. My only disappointment was not getting St. Mark’s bacon. If you know the story how they smuggled St. Mark’s body to Venice, you’ll be laughing. If you don’t, look it up, then you’ll be laughing.
If I raised pigs, I totally would start a company called St. Mark’s Bacon.
Anyhoodle, after that was a small bite to eat and then off to the Correr Museum. This is kind of an odd museum in that it has so many different things from the 8th century BC to Napoleonic. There’s a cool section on Venetian naval history and the Arsenal here.
But I need to digress. If you follow me on TwiX, you’ll have seen my post about the ITS Amerigo Vespucci along with the ITS Francesco Morosini which were both docked next to each other yesterday here at Venice.
Now, I thought it was cool that I could see an Italian frigate (whatever they call her, she’s a frigate). She’s the kind of ship we could use about 40 of in the U.S. Navy, about 4400 tons, a 5in gun, an Otero 76mm, two CIWS, and a some other guns, plus 2 triple torpedo launchers, 16 AA VLS, and 4 ASMs.
But it was even more special when I found out who Francesco Morosini was, and I only did so at the Correr museum because they have an entire room devoted to him. He was one of Venice’s great ship captains. How cool is that?
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the Correr and have a bunch of pictures of that too. The wife teased me that my picture taking finger would be tired. I said, “Too late.”
After that, we went to Murano to watch glass blowing at a particular glass-blowing company. It was soooo cool, but hot of course, since they heat the glass to 1200C.
I wish we could’ve see the glass-blowing museum they have over there, but it’s just one of the many things I wish I could’ve seen in Venice. We’ll come back again someday if we can.
We returned, at that point, to Giudecco to relax before our farewell dinner. The edge of our table was literally less than a yard to the lagoon. So beautiful.
We met some great people on this trip, saw some amazing things, went to some beautiful places, ate great food, drank delicious wine, and are so glad we got to do this trip—
But wait, there’s more!
Tomorrow, we head off to Florence. We’re going to do a number of the touristy things, but also recover from the Country Heritage pace. A vacation from our vacation.
But I’ll tell you all about it next time.
Before I go, though, I should mention Giant Killer Kaiju comes out on October 23rd! RAWRRRRR!!!
And also, Shattered Spear, my first boys adventure novel set in 10th-century England, comes out on November 13th.
What a great time for me! See you all next wee with more fun times!