2010 European Vacation: Aug 25, 2010

Here is a little more about the Vodafone stuff and why yesterdays post was posted today: We went to the Vodafone store (the only one in Venice) on Tuesday and again they did not have Internet sticks for Italy... and the pay as you go phone was 49 Euros....around $65.00 ....we will wait until France or Great Britain before we get or if we get a mobile phone at all.

So, since we left Germany, I have been purchasing 24 hour increments of roaming Internet access at 15 Euros a shot. Now what I did not realize was it has a limit of 50 megabytes. Now as you can tell, I'm loading a lot of pictures...and they take a lot of megabytes. I had to purchase 3 separate Internet sessions alone yesterday! Now I thought that would be enough for all the pictures I wanted to post yesterday....wrong! After I wrote the entire previous post I checked the megabyte usage and thought I had enough to add 1 last picture....wrong again! The Internet stopped right before I hit the "post" button. I did not want to buy another session so that post had to wait until we got to Switzerland on Wednesday. Yes you guessed it...we just arrived in Geneva. The rooms are really nice. The Internet costs 22 Swiss Francs per 24 hour period but this time without a limit on content. I will put a lot of pictures on this post.

Today is our 2oth Wedding anniversary. Audra and I were up until 1:15 AM last night doing laundry and packing to leave early today. I set my alarm to be sure we got a early start. I woke up around 7:00 AM without the alarm. I wanted to let Audra sleep in so I turned off my alarm. Unfortunately, I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew it was 8:45. A little late but no worries.... just a 7 hour scenic drive ahead of us to Switzerland. We left the Venice apartment at 11:15 AM and took the people ferry back to the parking structure. It traveled right down the Grand Canal. I videotaped the journey. It was really scary, there were too many boats going in all directions and we almost hit head on into a large barge as we passed under a bridge. Both boats had to hit reverse quickly! Just another day in Venice.

We decided to take a more scenic route today through the Swiss Alps and around Lake Geneva which is the largest lake in Europe. It is 72 kilometers long and is shaped like a crescent. It is beautiful.
Audra did 6 loads of laundry in these small machines.

Leaving Venice

Italians love their cars so much, they even eat above the highway so they can see them go by. These Auto Grills were all over (literately) the place.

Getting fuel in Italy.

Snacks at fuel stop.

Steve, these pictures are for you.

View from top of Switzerland Alps.

I wanted to have a nice anniversary dinner in a restaurant on the way to Geneva. We stopped at a town called Brig Gils in Switzerland. We could not read the menu and nobody spoke English. We went to a supermarket and bought sandwich stuff and stopped on the side of the road and had a great meal. Except for the funky fish sandwich Audra picked out...yuk!

Anniversary dinner at the side of the road.

Sunset on Lake Geneva in Switzerland

Sunset on the Alps

Tunnel in Switzerland.

Tunnel at night. Audra took this and we thought it was cool.

Tomorrow it is up early and off to Versailles then Paris.

Until tomorrow....

I know this is a day late and I will explain on the next post.

Hello again. As I said in the earlier post, we got a late start today. We had no idea what to expect in Venice during the day. When we began our walking adventure all we had on the agenda was: Vodafone store and the Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal. What we did not expect was that it seemed that an extra 20,000 people were roaming the streets. It was soooooo hot out, around 86 degrees. As you are walking around you had about 6 inches of clearance between you and everything like the walls, the person next to you etc......no space. For those of you that are claustrophobic, I recommend you only go out at night. It must be that the cruise ships add to the population by day (my guess) and they all disappear at the end of the day.

By the way, we had very little toilet paper in the apartment and since we do not have a mobile phone we could not call Paola our landlord. You would think no problem, just go to the store and buy more right? Well guess again. We added a new agenda item: find toilet paper! After asking 5 locals how to find a store that sells it we finally found a small store that sold cleaning supplies. Remember, they use bidet's here, weird device.

I could put a lot of cool pictures here but the ripoff Vodafone Internet connection will cost me $50 to post them all, Here are some highlights.

Wandering along with all of my new friends.