Venetian Adventure - Episode One

I'm back from Venice....but only just!! We had an amazing time but we nearly didn't make it home as planned. For those of you who know me, our trips usually (I call them adventures) follow the rocky path instead of the smooth one and this trip was no different. I'll start by telling you about the rocky parts and then all the fun stuff will follow.

On one of the wet days, and believe me, it can rain like there is no tomorrow in Venice, we decided to take the train to Verona on the mainland in the hope that it would be a tad drier there. Well, we had a lovely day in Verona, the scenery was beautiful and unspoilt.

We headed for the arena, stopping for tea along the way as Mark can't go for long without tea. Here he is with the biggest tea bag I have ever seen!!!!

We made it to the arena, which is supposed to be the third biggest remaining arena in Italy.....it was humungous!!!

Here's Mark waiting for the lions to come and get him!!!

The view from the top of the arena was amazing, you could see the snow capped mountains in the distance....simply beautiful but I left those piccies to Mark with his flashy camera (more pictures will follow in episode two!)

Anyway, we had a lovely, if wet day and headed back to the station to catch the train back to Venice. Half way through the journey the ticket collector asked to see out tickets which Mark has stashed safely in his wallet. The ticket inspector did not have the happy bunny look on her face...she asked where our stamp was. What stamp would that be? The stamp you get on your ticket before you get on the train she said...in broken English. Well, we didn't know that the ticket needed to be stamped and the ticket inspector on the outward journey didn't mentioned it either. To cut a very long story short, we had to show our passports and prove that we were indeed British (and stupid) Mark was taken away by said ticket inspector as there is apparently a 50 Euro fine for not validating you ticket. Because we had purchased our ticket from a machine and not the ticket office, we didn't know about the whole validation thingie and because it tells you in the smallest of small print on the back of the ticket, in both Italian and German...but not English and they thought we were complete idiots, they let us off the fine and were told not to be naughty children again as this is a very serious matter!!!!

We needed a drinky poo after this ordeal, so we headed for the Hard Rock Cafe.

We had a lovely meal and do you know they do the best pommegranite martinis......should have taken the photo before it disappeared, but the empty glass looked pretty too!!!!

So that was the first little adventure, the second one and more scary one was trying to get home. Our hotel did not have internet access so we decided to leave check-in until we got to the airport. Should have been simple except for one small, tiny, tiny, detail........our names were not on the flight list. The girl at check-in said that we should have been on the morning flight!!!! Our E ticket said different. We had to phone BA in London, actually a very helpful Italian lady rang BA for us and it turns out that when we first booked the holiday,they changed our flight details but didn't actually allocate tickets to us on the new flight. We were booked on the flight but the check-in girl didn't have this information. I really don't understand what happened, all I know is that it was an extremely long 45 minutes whilst we got the whole thing sorted out and I'm very happy to say we made it home as planned.

So that's all the grotty stuff, all the fun stuff will follow in episode two.