Venice Day 4 – Moving On To Vienna, Austria

Today is our last day in Venice.  The weather has been beautiful for the entire time here, something that does not always happen.  It has been cooler at night, and first thing in the mornings, but warmer during the day, actually warm enough for shorts.  We have to check out of the hotel today by 10:30 am, so we had to pack up the suitcases again last night so we did not have to face that task in the morning.

After we ate our breakfast in the hotel, we took our suitcases downstairs and put them in the storage area.  The hotel was nice enough to give us a key to get in to the front door later on in the evening, just in case they were not there when we came back for our luggage.  Our night train to Vienna, Austria does not leave Venice until 9:05 PM, so we did not want to have to pay to keep our luggage stored at the train station.  After checking out, we headed to the Vaporetto to take it to St. Mark’s Square to look at the Bridge of Sighs.  Unfortunately, when we got there, we realized it was in an area that is under renovation next to the Doge’s Palace.  You could still see the small bridge, but it was completely surrounded by a painted landscape that is also part of some advertising  After seeing it again. we recalled that this same advertising  has been there since our trip to Venice two years ago.

We then decided just to take a nice long Vaporetto ride to Murano, and hopped on the next one.  We were able to ride in the stern and take pictures as we went.  Once we got to Murano, we decided to go ahead and take another Vaporetto from there over to Burano, famous for their lace and linen.  We had not gone over to Burano before, mainly because it is about an hours ride there by Vaporetto from Murano.

The boat ride was nice, but we had to stand the whole way since the Vaporetto was a little crowded.  We got off and walked into the small town area.  We were surprised to find that it was a very clean and brightly colored town, similar to Murano, but nicer.

All of the buildings are painted with very bright colors, and appeared to be well kept.  Since it was time for lunch, we stopped at a local eatery and split a pizza and a half liter of red wine.

We really enjoyed the lunch, we ate in a covered area outside, and the weather was just beautiful.  We walked around the town, most of it was on a single loop that we easily walked in about an hour, stopping every once and awhile for photos, and to look into a store or two.

We headed back to the Vaporetto stop to return to Venice.  There was a boat loading up so we ran to get on before it left, only to find out they are on a schedule, and were not going to leave for several more minutes.  That is different from most of the normal Vaporetto stops, you only have about 30 seconds to get on after they stop, let people off and on, and then depart.  If they are ready to go and you are no on the boat in time, they will leave with you standing right there on the platform.

The ride back took about an hour and fifteen minutes, we had to stop at three places along the route back.  We ended up departing in an area near St. Mark’s Square, but a little ways away from all of the crowds.  We took a shortcut around the really crowded areas, and found a grocery store that we had not seen before.  Stephanie went in and bought a large bottle of Diet Coke for later on.  We headed over to the area around our hotel and stopped off for a glass of wine.  We drank a really good Rosso wine, and we wrote down the name hoping we could find it in a grocery or wine store to take with us on the overnight train ride to Vienna.

We looked in several wine stores, and also in a couple of different grocery stores, but could not the wine.  Since we had some time to kill, we actually ended up walking back to the train station from

our area of Venice looking in various stores for that wine. We did find a much larger grocery store near the train station that we did not know was there, but alas, they too did not have our wine.  We purchased something different to have on the night train and headed back to the hotel to get our luggage.  By this time, it had started to rain, our first bad weather since arriving in Levanto last Friday.

Umbrellas in hand, we made it back to the hotel, retrieved our luggage, and headed to the Vaporetto stop for the ride to the train station.  It was a little after 7:00 PM.  The Vaporetto ride took about 30 minutes, and with a short walk from the Vaporetto stop to the train station, we arrived around 7:45 PM.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat at the station, and saw that our train was at the platform about 40 minutes before our departure time, so we headed over to board.  We found our car and our compartment without any difficulty, and boarded.

The compartment was actually set up to accommodate 3 persons, it had three stacked bunk beds that folded out from the wall.  It was a little smaller than we had envisioned, but was set up with a small table, a sink area, a closet and a shelf for storing our luggage.

When we first got to the compartment, all of the beds were folded down, and there was only one seat in the compartment.  We discovered that the lower bunk made into two seats if it were folded up, so we folded it up, and also folded up the middle bunk.  We knew it was going to take some help from the car attendant to put the bunks back down because it required a large square key to release the locks.  However, we did not want to sit on the beds for the initial part of the journey.  Unfortunately, we did not take any pictures of the compartment set up with the bunks laid down.

The train left right on time at 9:05 PM.  We noticed it was not very cool in the compartment while we were at the station, and hoped the air conditioning would work better once were were moving. I do not think the cars had air conditioning, it never got much cooler even after we were underway.  The attendant came by and took our breakfast order, nothing special, some yogurt, coffee, juice, and rolls with ham and cheese. There was a window that would open, so that became our source of cooler air.  After getting everything situated, we put on some more comfortable sleeping clothes for the 11 hour journey to Vienna.  We sipped on some red wine, and watched the scenery go by until about 11:00 PM, when we got our bunks lowered, and went to sleep.

The train was quite loud, and a little rocky.  We did make a few stops during the night.  Both of us slept pretty well considering the motion and stops, but certainly not as good as we would have in a hotel.