And then there’s Venice
Namur is where the rivers Maas (Meuse) and Sambre meet. I love cities with big rivers flowing through it, and Namur is no exception. It has a lively night-life, a nice old town and a great citadel overlooking the city. Too bad we weren't allowed to explore the city to a satisfying extent. We arrived quite late and had to catch our plane at 6:30am on the next day.
Raynair doesn't really fly to Venice, just like they don't really fly to Brussels. From Treviso airport, even smaller then Charleroi, you have three options for getting to Venice: Taxi (expensive), public transport (slow and infrequent) or shuttle bus (expensive and slow and infrequent but the most convenient).
In the week prior to us leaving for Venice, I had tried to secure a place to stay. Almost impossible. Originally, we were going to arrive on a Saturday evening and, apparently, in October, that meant booked hotels for months in advance. Although we now arrived a day later, we still planned on staying at the same place I did find a week earlier: a camping 'just' outside Venice. Not that we were going to stay in a tent. The largest part of the camping featured small bungalows in odd shapes.
We took the shuttle bus from Treviso to the Venice train station. From there we took a bus to Marco Polo (Venice airport) and from there we had to take another bus to the camping. We managed all this but, as it turned out, the directions given to me by camping staff ware incomplete. We got the right bus leaving from Marco Polo airport, in the wrong direction. By the time we figured it out, we had no choice but to walk back all the way to the airport and on to the camping. A mere five kilometer walk. When we finally arrived, we put together some lunch from the camping store and enjoyed the bread, cheese and wine alongside a nearby canal, just before taking a very necessary midday nap. We had made it. Sort of.
On the Canal Grande
Gondolas in Venice cost a fortune. I'm serious. The few people that do rent one generally take the 50 minute trip with 5 or more people, to make the trip slightly more affordable. An alternative is to take a vaporetto. Vaporetti (the plural) are, basically boat services running along the Canal Grande. The vaporetto No 1 runs from the train (and bus station) on one end of the Canal Grande, all the way to the Lido, going through the complete Canal Grande and passing the Piazza San Marco (if ever you've seen anything of Venice, it's this Piazza (square). The No 1 is slow, the trip from the train station to the Piazza San Marco takes about an hour, but the cost (about 3 euros for a ticket) is nothing compared to euro-per-minute for the gondolas.
Most of the pictures I took in Venice this time (this was my second visit) I took on one of two trips we took with the vaporetti during our two days in Venice.