Day 3 - Venice - Verona

(written by Craig)
On waking around 1.30am, we decided to take an early walk and photograph the sunrise. The morning was frigid, with a windchill taking the temp to below zero. Lyn is so cute when she's cold! <3

After checking out of the hotel we took the water bus back to the airport to begin the next part of our adventure... the rental car ... left hand driving and high-speed autostrade (up to 150kph) bring new challenges. We were going well avoiding the huge number of trucks on the road and their crazy passing maneuvers... until we came across a queue of cars enterin a toll booth area - all intructions in Italian and nowhere to put in coins... cars queuing up behind we luckily noticed a button which popped a ticket out - grabbing the ticket opened the barrier and we were off, not knowing what to do with the ticket. The only recognisable word on the ticket was 'polizia' - which fed a little unease.

We saw our first castle on the way to Verona - one of many, we are sure, if it's anything like the frequency of bell towers so far.

On entering Verona we came across another toll booth area, and Lyn was the first to click that we were to insert the ticket and put in a credit card, while the speaker was spewing out italian info we could not understand. Yay for my girl Lyn!!

We came to rely on the Tomtom GPS quickly - it cut throught he confusion of Italian only road signs, leading us directly to the B&B we had chosed from the Lonely Planet guide, through bizarre roads and crazy drivers. This afternoon we walked around the arena/amphitheater where gladiators once fought, and sadly, Christians died. A pair of likely lads dressed as Romans tried to charge us for allowing us to take a photo of them, but we ran faster.

After a bit of hunting around, we found Juliet's (Guilette) balcony - which Shakespeare based his famous love story on. (pic above) Not sure about the wierd tradition of touching the breast of Juliet's statue for better luck in love... considering she died. Queues of asian boys and girls doing this made us wonder.

Lyn purchased an Italian Leather handbag (of course no expensive labels though) from a stall in Piazza Dei Signori. Italy redeemed itself with some fantastic pasta from a tiny restaurant where the staff knew no English and we knew little if no Italian, but the waitress's face lit up when we said the word "bueno" Then off to sleep, hmmm at 8pm again ... the nana's that we are ;)