Eastern European Vacation Day 4

Sunday October 31st 2010.
The weather finally broke today; it rained much of the night and was still drizzling when we headed out of the hotel for one final jaunt around Venice. The hotel was kind enough to store our luggage after we checked out – allowing us a last few hours of aimless wandering, which is definitely the thing to do in Venice.

We headed to St. Mark’s Square doing mostly window shopping and taking even more pictures. From here we slowly made our way back to the restaurant we had dined in the previous night – we even found it, despite its location down a tiny back alley. Lunch was superb; pasta cooked to perfection, amazing seafood – but we did not have time for dessert. We were afraid we were not going to make it back to the hotel in time to meet the water taxi that we had ordered; so we beat a pretty fast retreat. We made it with about 5 minutes to spare – then the taxi was 15 minutes late, typical!

During the night the Queen Victoria had moved from its location beside St. Mark’s Square to the regular cruise terminal on the other side of Venice. The bags were loaded and the taxi headed out for the 20 minute ride to the terminal. Once we cleared the Grand Canal and entered the channel between Venice and the Lido the water got quite choppy, and with the rain coming down it was quite an eventful ride.

When we reached the cruise terminal there were 6 ships docked – none as spectacular as the Queen Victoria. After a short wait our taxi was able to dock and, after handing over the 100 Euros (which seems to be the standard rate for anything over a short taxi ride), our bags were unloaded into the capable hands of the porters. We made our way to the check-in area and onto the ship without any problems.

Our cabin is very nicely fitted out and seems a tad larger than the cabins we’ve had on the Queen Mary 2 – we also have a spacious balcony, let’s hope we get some better weather so we can spend time on it. Before dinner we discovered that, because of forecasted rough weather, we will not be making our first port call – Split in Croatia. This news is a bit of a blow since we had really been looking forward to seeing the town and the Roman Palace. On the upside we are now getting an extra day at sea which we all agree will give us a chance to recharge our batteries – we are all feeling very tired from our Venetian excursions.

We had a bit of a hiccup at dinner when we were informed that Kat and Mike were going to be seated on a different table from us. Sandra was able to sort out the problem and Cunard soon saw the error of their ways. Dinner was good but we all agreed that the food in Venice was a hard act to follow. After dinner we made our way up to the Commodore Club right at the front of the ship on deck 10, and watched Venice slide past in the dark as we got under way. The captain has said that the seas may be rough over the next day – hopefully we can get a good nights sleep.