Thursday: July 3
Venice, Jim Gets Strung Up
This is the “Goodbye to Venice” day. If it wasn’t for our extension, this would have been all that we would have seen of Venice.
I had a hard time sleeping last night. I don’t know if it was the latte at 5, or if it was the temperature, or something else. We went to bed around 9-10, I think, but I couldn’t fall asleep to save myself. Unfortunately, there is just a comforter on the bed, so there are basically two choices, over or under the comforter. One would be too cold and the other too warm. I supposed you could get half in and half out, but not easily.
I eventually did fall asleep, but it was hard to tell when, because I initially dreamed of trying to sleep and not being able to.
The alarm went off at 6, and we got up. We had a fairly early day.
We went up to the World Cafe for breakfast (buffet style). There were the typical dozens of kinds of food to choose from. Unfortunately, the OJ wasn’t fresh squeezed, and it tasted slightly watery. I tried getting my own from a machine, but that was even more watery. That tasted like half OJ and half water
Amy headed out first. She went on the included trip, which was basically a trip to St. Mark’s square and then two hours of free time. It would have been good, except that we had spent a day and half wandering around that area already.
I headed out about 15 minutes later. I was going to a tour of the Doge’s palace. There was about a 45 minute boat ride to Venice. Apparently back in 2019 there was a collision of a cruise ship with a local boat, and so now the cruise ships dock at a nearby port.
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Going in to the palace, we had to go through security, where they took exception to my (tiny) pocket knife. They handled it well, however. It went in to a sealed and numbered plastic bag. I got the top portion as a receipt. It somehow migrated to the exit. On my way out, I presented the receipt, and I got my pocket knife back.
It was rather warm, but we spent most of our time indoors, so at least I wasn’t in the sun. After going in, we had an hour to do the public tour on our own. There were placards in each room giving a description in multiple languages. Fortunately one of them was English.
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It was the typical Renaissance palace—huge rooms, ornate paintings, etc. The timing was a bit tricky. I had to be back in the courtyard after the hour was up for a more private tour. The issue is that I had no idea how long the path through the palace was. I didn’t want to go through too quickly and end up at the exit after only a half hour, but I also didn’t want to be only halfway through when I ran out of time.
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I went through the “noble’s” section (the ornate part), then crossed the Bridge of Tears to the prison area. I was running low on time, and there was a junction with a “full” tour and a “short” tour, so I took the short one, and got to the meeting point only a few minutes early.
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At the scheduled time, we were met by a local guide who would take us through some of the non-public areas (I.e. those areas that you could only go through with a guide). We started in some ground floor prison cells. These were particularly nasty during the “high water” times (I.e. the floods), where the prisoners would be in their cells in several feet of sea water for 5-6 hours at a time. That would be rather brutal.
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She called for a volunteer to be “tortured” later on. I thought about volunteering, but a woman volunteered her husband.
We went through the tour, which was a lot of the areas where the middle class civil servants worked, and where some of the judiciary business was done. The “volunteer” and his wife bailed halfway through, so our guide needed another volunteer. This time, I did volunteer.
When we got to that part of the building, I was of course not actually tortured, but demonstrated (in a meager way) how one might be hauled up strappado (by the hands tied behind one’s back), which caused great pain and injury to the shoulder area.
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After the tour, there was about a half hour for people to wander around St. Mark’s square. I had already been through that enough times, so instead I went back into the public path, zoomed through the first portion, and then took the “full” tour of the prison.
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That was just about right, because I came out, collected my pocket knife, and walked the four bridges to where the boat was, arriving about 3-4 minutes early.
I was thinking that one of those dorky little battery operated fans would actually feel very good about then.
I took the boat back to the ship. The breeze through the window felt really nice.
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At the ship, we had to go through security again, although we didn’t need to show our passports (although we did need our ship’s card).
I dropped my stuff out in our room, where I met Amy. Then we went up to the World Cafe for lunch. Fortunately, my squirrels seem to be migrating, because my stomach is beginning to start feeling more normal.
After lunch, we went back to our room where we heard the mandatory safety spiel. I thought that we might need to actually go to our muster station (for practice), but they just demonstrated the emergency tone (7 short and 1 long tone) and described what we needed to do.
After that, it was getting close to the time for us to leave Venice, so I went up to the Explorer’s Lounge (high front of the ship). We weren’t leaving yet, so I just sat in the lounge (out of the sun) typing up the day’s events. I got about halfway through, when I noticed that we were now slowly moving. I put the iPad away and went out front to the railing. To my surprise, there was a tug leading us out on a tow line. I would think that with the bow thrusters and the podded props, we wouldn’t need a tug, but perhaps it is a Venice regulation.
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We had to go down the channel for quite a while before we reached the open sea. I guess that there is a very slow speed limit (for large ships) in the channel, because we were going really really slowly. After a while, I got tired of baking in the sun, and we were only halfway down the channel, so I went back in to do more typing. A bit later, around 4:10, I found Amy. She mentioned that something was going on at 4. I checked the calendar, and there was afternoon tea from 4 to 5, but we wanted to catch the Port Talk at 4:30.
I hurried to the tea, and was shortly joined by Amy. They had a menu with maybe a dozen kinds of tea (including Rooibos, which Amy likes) along with scones, snacks, and finger sandwiches. I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been, that the tea was made with leaves in a strainer, and not with bags.
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Unfortunately, we had to scarf a few snacks, gulp some tea, and then hurry to the Port Talk, only being about 2 minutes late.
After the port talk, I hurried back to the room and took my afternoon shower. It was really nice to get clean and change into clean clothes. After that, we caught a little bit of the pianist/cellist in the Atrium (while I’ve been typing more of this up). Now I need to go back to the theater to hear a talk about the connections between Game of Thrones and Croatia (I guess one season was filmed there a lot). After that will be dinner.
Earlier, I was thinking, “what are we going to do with the second half of the day?” At least today, the reality is that we’ve been busy pretty much all day, and we haven’t even thought about trying one of the pools.
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Actually, the talk was a combination of the history of Game of Thrones, how much it reflected real events, and then at the end how it was filmed in Dubrovnik. The speaker was extremely entertaining and interesting. I’ll have to catch his (Russell Lee) future talks regardless of whether the topic particularly interests me.
After the talk, we went to dinner. We happened to sit next to a couple that we had met earlier, so we chatted a bit while we waited for our food. The couple had arrived long before us, so they were getting their dessert about the same time we were getting our appetizers.
The strangest thing happened. We happened to run into a couple that we had met on a previous cruise (Meera and David). They had been on the Christmas Market cruise with us.
Dinner lasted until almost 9. We went back down to the stage for the captain to introduce himself and the crew, and to get a musical snippet from the different cruise musicians.
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I got a text message saying that my Rome excursion was canceled due to lack of interest. I couldn’t figure out how to get a description of the available excursions on the app, so I went down to guest services and had them show me. I went back up to the room, looked through them, and decided on one to select. For some reason, I couldn’t book it from the app, so I had to go back down. They booked it for me and made a note to tell tech services that there was some issue with the app.
Tomorrow (Actually, the day after tomorrow) is going to be interesting. That will be Amy’s tight day. She is returning from a morning excursion at literally the same time that she is supposed to be meeting to leave on the afternoon excursion. I need to figure out some way to get some lunch for her to eat on the way. This could be tricky, as they don’t have “take out bags”.
My stomach seems to be better. Now the big question is whether I can sleep tonight.