First Free Weekend - Venice!

Friday, February 27th - Sunday, March 1st

Our first free weekend in Venice!!! HOW AWESOME! It was definitely nice to get away from the busy city for a few days. Not that I haven’t enjoyed Rome, because it has been incredible, but it was also really nice to escape the hectic lifestyle for the weekend.

When booking this trip, we had the option to take a fast train or to fly. The train would have taken a few hours and flying was a much quicker option at only about 45 minutes. Surprisingly, not only was flying faster but ticket prices were actually a lot more reasonable. Plus, flying into Venice was definitely an experience in itself. Getting to land so close to the water was so pretty to see from out of our plane window. (We thought it was beautiful during the daytime, then we saw it at night when we coming home!!)

Me and Brandi being silly on the plane...

Once we landed, we were able to get our waterbus passes for the weekend and we took public transportation in to the Piazza Roma, the farthest place in Venice that cars/buses are able to go! Once there, we took our first waterbus and attempted to find our hostel. (Key word there was “attempted”) We quickly learned that getting lost was going to be a normal thing and just got used to making it into an adventure!

Once we found our hostel, one brown door in a group of five others that looked exactly the same! But the hostel was great, and once we found it, we always made sure we knew how to get back. The water buses got a lot easier once we learned to treat them exactly like the metro in Rome.

The view itself in Venice was breath taking. Around every corner was a surprise, a hidden gem, and getting a little turned around became enjoyable. On Friday we found the Rialto Bridge, and just below it, the small shop of a genuine mask-maker Sergio Boldrin. We did some shopping too!

On Saturday Brandi and I grabbed breakfast in a cute café that we found and ended up talking to the bar tender, Tomas, for over an hour. We left only after promising to come back and see him that night! Later that day, we took at water bus to Murano and got to check out the amazing glass blowing there. Brandi and I spent the day exploring the island and had a great dinner after meeting up with our group! That night we got to check out the little bit of nightlife in Venice and really enjoyed Frufala, an outdoor smoothie bar!

Strawberry Smoothie, Pina Colada, Frozen Mango Martini... YUM!

Enjoying Murano!

That night we also were able to explore San Marco Square... It was so beautiful!! We did not make it into the Church of San Marco, however seeing it from the outside was absolutely breathtaking!!

I would go back to Venice in a heartbeat! It was definitely a nice change of pace from Rome, beautiful, and we met so many wonderful people!! Such a great first weekend, Venice will be hard to beat.