Euporean Adventure cont.

After our experience in Dublin with the whole family, we had a nifty item called a "Buggy Board". Buggy being the British term for a Stroller. The buggy board is a little plastic board on wheels that attaches to the back of the stroller. It allows Brendan or Kyra to catch a ride, and really made a big difference. We had a backpack full of snacks, drinks, pens, paper, crayons and toys for the kids, and a diaper bag. As well as our two strollers (one with buggy board) and our carefully packed single suitcase with enough clothing and diapers for exactly 4 days. 

We got to the runway a little late. These no-frills airlines have no assigned seating, you just grab an available seat, but they board wheelchairs and children first. We were the last in line, and I thought we would have to ask people to move so that we could sit together... but amazingly enough, there were 3 empty seats, and two rows back, another 3 empty seats. I sat in one set with the boys, and Kristin sat two rows back with the girls, (and had an extra seat).

We got to the Treviso Airport and it was about 8 degrees celcius. (I'd never thought of any mediteranean city as Cold, but they can be!) They had a passport check right inside the terminal, so the queue extended outside. We collected our strollers, strapped Holden down into his, Courtney into hers and proceeded to the back of the line. In almost every airport situation, you can picture the Temple family standing at the very end of the line due to the extra time required for mobilization.

Just let me digress again: I'm going to describe a lot of not-so-fun experiences and difficulties, but overall, the trip was amazing and fun, and if I had to do it all again, knowing about the hassles, I would.

So the Temple family proceeded through the passport line, holding up appropriate children for viewing, collected our suitcase and marched out into another line. This time for bus tickets. (We were somewhat startled to see fully armed, camoflaged, soldiers in full combat gear stationed all around the airport.)

As an aside for how Ryanair (and other no-frills airlines) work, they fly from small airports that aren't always exactly in the city you are going to. In the case of Venice, Ryanair flys to Treviso, which is a good distance out. Treviso airport is a refitted air force base, and the terminal is smaller than the tri-cities airport. They have a departure area and an arrival area with a single baggage retrieval conveyor. There is a bus service that operates based on the Ryanair schedule, and takes people to Venice. Before this service started, or if you miss it, you can take a Treviso city bus to a train station and catch a train to Venice.

I stood in the line where people were exchanging pounds for lira, and buying the bus tickets. At that time, I didn't know the information I provided in the preceding paragraph. I had a printout from the hotel telling us to catch a bus to the "Piazza Rome" and then instructions on getting to our hotel from there. I had also planned to withdraw lira from an ATM (Bancomat in italian) When I got to the front of the line, I told the girl working there that I needed to get a bus to the Piazza Rome, and then a Boat to Lido (the Island with our hotel). I hadn't planned on the airport being so tiny and didn't see a Bancomat/ATM. I asked if I could use a visa and was told that there was a 20% charge, but there was an ATM in the departures lounge. She also said they didn't sell the boat tickets. I thought she said they didn't sell the bus tickets to Piazza Rome but I was wrong, she must have been saying something else...

We ran to the departures lounge, got some lira and went to the busses which were almost done loading. The driver spoke limited english, which was far superior to my italian. He was going to the Piazza Rome, and began loading our suitcase and strollers. When I went to pay, he indicated that I needed a ticket. So I sprinted back to the arrivals area where the girl had just closed the ticket booth. She was angry but sold me the tickets for 56,000 lira including the return tickets. (I showed her on my hotel instructions my desired destination.) When I got back to the bus, and gave my tickets to the driver, he became upset and tried to tell me something, but we couldn't get it worked out. Finally he loaded us up and we were off...

After arriving in Piazza Roma Nuevo, and getting all our children and baggage loaded, the driver and someone (I presume a manager) came over, He gave me 30,000 lira. The driver indicated that I owed them some change, but the manager waved it away and I think apologised. The tickets didn't mention Rome or Roma, so I've concluded that I was sold more expensive tickets to a further destination.

We then went in search of the boat tickets... This went much better, I showed my family, and indicated we wanted a 3 day pass. I ended up getting 3 1-Day passes. And we were off. Fortunately the hotel info had specified exactly which boats to catch. These are the equivalent of a city bus, and are quite fun. After doing our ritual unload kids, fold strollers, and carry all onto boat, we saw that others were pushing their strollers right onto the boat, and quickly adopted this method.

The boats had several configurations, but the most common is an open area where you board, (out in the wind) and stairs leading down in the front and rear of the boat. The front section doesn't have doors and is cold, but out of the wind, and the rear section has doors and is heated. We got a good workout carrying our strollers up and down these stairs. Brendan always wanted to be up in the center open section. Looking out the windows wasn't enough for him. But it was amazingly cold out there.

I realized later, that I should have 'validated' one of my tickets before we got on the boat. had anyone checked, we would have been fined. nobody checked that day, and I did validate a pass for the remaining days we rode the boats.

The instructions for our hotel said that Hotel Giardinetto was a 'dependance' of Hotel Riatto, and we needed to check in at Hotel Riatto. We started hiking... We ran into a British couple also looking for this hotel, who were staying at our hotel, and also happened to be sitting in the row between ours on the flight over. He used his cell phone to call the Hotel, and got directions to where we were standing... The hotel had a small sign next to a single door about 3 stores from where we were. We then found out from the guy there, that we didn't need to check in, that Giardinetto did their own check-in!

We had chosen the Giardinetto because of one thing. They happlily accepted a family of six, and gave us an affordable "quadruple" room. The other hotels we found and travel agents all tried to split us into two rooms or were completely out of our budget. When we got into our room, Kyra exclaimed "it's a room of only beds!"

Italy has an interesting variety of toilets: The worst were a porcelain square surrounding a hole in the floor. (these did have a flush cord or button). They also had the typical 'american' toilet with a seat and lid that flip up. Another kind were like the typical toilet, but they are lower, and have no seat or lid, just a narrow porcelin rim. Like a toilet with the top half cut off... The last kind we saw was in our room, next to our regular toilet, and was more of a toilet shaped sink. (We had a regular sink,) It had a spray faucet (facing down), and a drain plug. We left it alone...

Our first night in Venice, (it was dark and cold) we went out for dinner. We found a little italian Pizzeria, and ordered some pizza. When we got the check we learned of a quaint little Italian (or venician) custom. Most of the restaraunts where you sit down include the service charge (12%) and a Cover charge (Coperto). Our learning experience had a stiff charge of 6000 lira per person. A lot of places were 2,500, but we only ate at one other sit down restaraunt in Italy because it is a big expense for the temple family to sit down!

As an aside on Italian Money... They currently use the Lira, which is usually based on the thousand. The smallest paper currency is the 1000 lira note. The smallest coin I saw was a 50 lira coin. It would be like our penny. Italy is one of the countries converting to the Euro, so all the prices are listed in both. About 2000 lira = 1 US dollar. It is very easy to be an Italian millionaire.

We found a grocery store and a McDonalds and we had the majority of our meals from these places. It is pathetic to eat at McDonalds with all the great italian food around, but if you have travelled with little kids, on a budget, you might understand. McDonalds had almost the same menu, they had the same happy meal toys we were getting in England. The extra value meal was called McMenu. So I could order a McMenu Quatro Medio and get a Chicken Sandwich Extra Value meal with medium fries and drink. Mostly they spoke some english, and the one time I had a non-english speaking worker, we were really creative and we got the order correct. (which doesn't happen in England most of the time.)

McDonalds had a sandwich called a McPink. It was a 'burger' made with the standard sausage patty instead of the beef patty.

We went to the basilica (St Marks Cathedral) it was amazing. The kids called it the "Bird Party" because there were hundreds of pigeons. Vendors sold food, and if you held your arms out, the pigeons would land on them. Kyra and Brendan forgot the name for pigeons, and started calling them "groovy chicks."

Our hotel rate included breakfast. The breakfasts were interesting. They had several varieties of dried bread/toast, cheese, pate, and nutella. Nutella being a hazelnut/chocolate spread. The first day I managed to get them to eat some of the dried bread and cheese before they got into the nutella. The second breakfast consisted of nutella on dried bread, with a few bites of fruit or cheese. The third breakfast was nutella, no pretense of bread, fruit or cheese was present. (The italians seem to have a special affection for dried breads.)

Our last scheduled day in Venice was Thursday. Since our bus left venice at 1:15, after breakfast we didn't have a long time to spare. Kristin went shopping and bought some more snow gear for the kids, which turned out to be very necessary. We also stocked up on snacks for the flight home. We then started our trip home, and it started to snow and rain.

We got to the bus in the sleet. I confirmed that the bus was going to the Treviso airport, The driver (a different one) asked for my tickets. He took them, and I said I was going to put the luggage in the luggage area. After loading the strollers and suitcases we started going onto the bus, and were stopped by the driver asking for the tickets. I told him that he had them. He didn't understand. I tried to explain that I gave him the tickets before I loaded the luggage. A Englishman that was sitting on the bus helped out (not) by telling us that "If you'd given him the tickets he would have punched them and given them back." The driver told us to come with him, I think he was going to start unloading our luggage. I started trying to recreate the situation, saying I asked "Treviso Airport" you said "Yes, Tickets?" I gave them to you and said "I'm going to put our luggage in." Suddenly the bus driver remembered, and let us get on... Whew! The couple that we had met at our hotel were also on the bus, and I told them what had happened.

We got to the airport, got checked in and started waiting. By this time, the snow was really coming down. A flight to Brussels (the only other flight out of Treviso) was cancelled, and shortly, our flight was too. Naturally we were the last people in line to get sorted out for the next flight. Our friends from the hotel were next to us in line, and they were a lot of help. We used their cell phone to call the Ryanair office in London and we managed to confirm flights on the 9:00 PM flight Friday. My mobile had been flashing low battery all day, and I only turned it on to check the time. When this happened, I managed to send a text message to my boss before the battery died completely. (We were supposed to be back on Friday. I was going to work, and then we had babysitters and theatre tickets in london to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.)

The shuttle bus wasn't running, and people were finding that the hotels were full in the Treviso area. We rented a car, because I couldn't handle hiking from the bust stop to the train station, to the boat station to the hotel etc in the cold, wet windy night with all our children. By the time we had got to the counter where they were arranging flights, we already had our confirmation.

So the six of us piled into our Fiat Punto. If you've never seen a Fiat Punto, picture a VW rabbit, only without all the leg room, seating space or cargo area. We had to put some of the luggage behind the front seat, so Holden had no leg room.

We started driving, looking for a hotel. We couldn't face the thought of riding the boats out to Lido in the bad weather, so we looked in Mainland Italy. We did find a McDonalds in Treviso, and it even had a little playland (haven't seen one of those in England.) This was really the first fun the kids had had the whole day. They also hadn't had any dinner except for the "airplane snacks" since we would have got to England around 6:00.

To make a long story less long, (if you've gotten to this point, you know the story isn't short) we drove for over 250 kilometers on the slick roads, stopping at every hotel we found, and ended up sleeping in the car.... well, the kids slept. Kristin took short naps, but since she was holding Courtney, and couldn't lean the seat back. About 3:00 AM, I stopped looking for a hotel and decided to take the Motorway (Freeway) back towards Venice. We were driving along, when the traffic came to a complete stop. About 6:30, someone came by our car and told us that we could drive on the shoulder. We took his advice and noticed that the stopped traffic now consisted of Tractor-trailers with large spaces where the cars used to be... We were on a toll-road, and made about 5 miles before we came to the pay terminal. We waited another hour at the toll booth before we could pay and go through to the next traffic jam. I did get a little bit of sleep in the traffic jams, but about 8:00 the kids were waking up and hungry so we started our Anniversary in Italy.

Now is the fun part. We had noticed signes for a Monet exibition in Treviso, so we decided that since Monet is one of Kristin's favorite artists, we would try to track this down. And we did. (the exibition was in Italian, but the Monet collection was extensive.) Had we made our flight, we never would have made it to this. Kyra enjoyed it, but Brendan and Holden aren't really at that stage right now. But, since they behaved so well, we took them for another round of McDonalds playland, which is something that they miss from the USA.

Eventually we returned our Fiat Punto hotel room, and made it onto our flight. We were home and tucked into our beds sometime after midnight. (after a nice hot, sorely needed shower.) All in all, it was a very memorable experience. We learned one or two words in Italian. A word we heard several times was Quattro! ...As in "Quattro Bambinos!" One older gentleman even walked up and said Quattro! Complimentes! And broadly smiled to show his approval (and amazement?) of the tourists who braved Venice with four small children.

Someday, I'd like to return with only Kristin, or with older children who can 'get more out of it'. But it was an adventure, and the kids had 3 full days of boat rides and bird parties... 

-Brent, Kristin, Kyra, Brendan, Holden, and Courtney.