Is is dark in the middle of the night in the Dolomites – really, really dark. At some point I woke up before sunrise, and I could not see a thing. I bet the stars up there are spectacular, although we could not see them last night because of the rain and clouds. We got ready efficiently this morning and had another huge breakfast spread, which included meats and granola and yogurt, since the area is very Germanic. After breakfast, we did take a thirty-minute walk in the meadows, since the rain had stopped overnight. The mountains were playing hide-and-seek with us, sometimes being visible and sometimes being shrouded in clouds and fog.

We checked out and did take time to go and pet the now-two-day-old goat babies. We then hauled our bags up a long hill of a couple of hundred feet in elevation to the chair lift. We took the chair lift down, and then we caught the bus after a twenty-minute wait. The bus took us to the cable car, which took us down to the main road, where we caught another bus right away, which took us down the winding mountain road to the train station. We just caught the train to Verona, where we transferred to a final train to the day’s destination, Venice.

Venice is overrun with tourists, but still maintains a magical atmosphere. We stored our luggage at the train station, and headed out into the city. As soon as I saw the Grand Canal, I got excited. Sadly, we only had about four hours to explore the city, since our hotel was on the mainland at the end of another bus run, but you can cover a lot of ground in Venice in four hours.

The best thing to do, by far, is to jump into the warren of roads and alleys in the city. Mer knew she wanted to get to a place on the eastern part of the Grand Canal, but she did not care how we got there, so we took whatever road or alley seemed best (usually the one with the fewest tourists). You can get quite alone once you are off the main paths of Venice, and sometimes you hit dead ends or a canal with no bridge. Sometimes you find or small churches, or cute squares, or beautiful apartments with pretty window boxes. The fun of Venice is Venice itself.
We did finally find the restaurant Mer wanted – it was located right on the Grand Canal with great views of the boat traffic. Since it was about 4:30, they were not serving any real food, so we ordered dessert and a hot chocolate, and we amused ourselves for over a half hour watching life go by in boats. We noticed tons of private taxi boats filled to the brim with Asian tourists taking pictures of everything. There were work boats steered by men who were more interested in their cigarettes than boat traffic. There were gondoliers who yelled conversations at each other, sometimes as many as five all at once. It was quite a spot.

We then plunged back into the maze of streets. If we had a specific destination, I did not know what it was until quite a bit later, when Mer announced that she wanted to get back to the train station so she could take a water bus to St. Mark’s and back. We actually found where we were on the map, which was more or less eighty percent of the way across Venice. We needed to go west and north, which seemed simple until you threw in the canals and dead ends. It took us a long, but very scenic, time to get back to the train station. By then, we did not have time to take the water taxi, so we walked along the Grand Canal and other main tourist streets for about twenty minutes before heading back to the train station to get our bags. From there we walked over to the bus station to catch a bus for the mainland.

What a bus it was – it was an “expando-bus,” a standard bus with an additional section put on the back to hold more passengers, and we still almost did not fit on. It was wall-to-wall passengers for over twenty minutes out of the forty-five-minute bus ride. We finally got seats for the last fifteen minutes or so.

Once we got to our bus station, Mer had to ask around for directions. Meanwhile, I saw a sign for our accommodations – a working farm/villa. With Mer’s directions and my confirmation, we walked to the farm, taking about ten minutes to do so. We were greeted and shown to our room, which was very serviceable, with a very cool wooden-beam ceiling. The mistress of the house made us an excellent supper of pasta, salad, and rolls. While we were eating, she had an argument with a drunk man outside, and he left. Then, we heard a peacock calling outside the window, and we found out the farm has a peacock. Peacocks have a distinctive call, which is slightly startling when you do not expect it. It made for an interesting dinner. The landlady was very kind to us and talked to both of us, even though my Italian is almost nonexistent.

So, at the end of a day involving three buses, two trains, two cable cars, and a lot of footwork, along with the loss of 6,700 feet of altitude, I am pretty beat. Here’s hoping the peacock is on my sleep schedule.