After another delicious breakfast at Hotel Cascada, we checked out and headed up to the train station. As a parting gift, the hotel handed us all a bottle of water to send us on our way with, just another example of their excellent customer service.

We caught a train to Zurich airport, which went very smoothly. We are all over the right platform and carriage and seats etc by now! Our flight to Venice was delayed leaving by 15 minutes but arrived at the scheduled arrival time. It was a much rougher flight than the others – we felt like the trainee we saw in the cockpit had been allowed to steer 😬 – but over in less than an hour.

From Venice airport we took a bus to the edge of the island and then a water taxi to the Rialto Bridge, which we had to walk up and over with all our bags to get to our hotel on the other side. The hotel is very in keeping with the Venetian theme, but is very small!

After all our different forms of transport today, it was almost 5pm by the time we completed check-in and decided to explore. We hadn’t had lunch so everyone was quite hungry and ready for an early dinner.

We made it in to St Mark’s Square and several side streets, but then returned to the restaurant next to our hotel for dinner, Riva Rialto. Most of us were happy with our pizza or pasta meals, but Ross’ was quite small so he went in search of a slice of pizza after dinner.

The rest of us crossed Rialto Bridge again to get some gelato for dessert – Beck has had gelato on her must-do list since we arrived in Europe. We are all now back in our rooms at 8pm thinking we will have an early night just because there is not much else to do! There is nowhere here to congregate as a group – we are missing our Baroque room in Salzburg! We are though looking forward to exploring Venice all day tomorrow.