Venice & Milan, Italy

When we woke up it was raining again. We were really hoping for a nice day. Breakfast was good at our hotel. I still love that Italy serves desert with breakfast. We also had more hot chocolate. Mmmm it is good. After breakfast we checked out of our hotel room and stowed our bags in their storage room.
We visited Galleria San Marco, which does glass blowing demos. We watched him make a vase and a horse out of molten glass. It was really cool. The salesman then showed us around his shop. The chandeliers were incredible but completely out of our price range. Really everything in the entire store was out of our price range, but watching the demos was a neat experience.
It was still raining but this was our only day in Venice so we were going to experience it even if we got wet. We wondered the streets and after about an hour the rain stopped and the sun even came out for a little while. There are mask shops everywhere and really fun to look at. I had no desire to own a mask because what would I do with it when I got home?
The one thing Sam wanted to do in Venice was take a Gondola Ride. It actually cost more than our hotel room did but what an experience! Sam was almost giddy about it. I had a great time photographing the places that you could only see by canals and not by foot. Our gondolier told us a little about the history of Venice and pointed out the interesting places we past.
After our ride we went back to Rosticceria San Bartolomeo for more mozzarella al prosciutto and hot chocolate. After exploring the city a little more we made it back to the hotel for our bags. We took a vaporetto back to the train station for our 5:20 train to Milan.
We arrived in Milan a little before 8 pm and went back to our previous hotel to see if they had our camera. They did not, so we found a restaurant to eat at. I had wonderful pasta and savored my last Italian meal. After dinner we took a bus to the airport. We called our hotel to get a shuttle from the airport but it took us about a half hour to figure out how to use the phone and by the time we got through they had stopped their shuttle five minutes before. We asked a taxi driver how much it would cost to get to our hotel and he told us 20 Euro. We found and ATM got 20 more Euro got took the taxi the 10 minutes to our hotel. When we got there the taxi driver wanted 45 Euro for the trip! We only had 30 so he took what we had, but we still felt taken advantage of. Oh well, we will be home tomorrow.