I had a “date” to meet Jill for coffee this morning so I took the vaporetto from San Toma out to Sant Elena. I knew I had no more rides on my card but I just couldn’t make the machine work at the stop. Another woman even tried to help but it was “non funziona” so I think, I rode for free.
Jill and I had a fabulous visit–just talking and talking. We sat at an outdoor bar in a park like area. I will have to go back and wander around Sant Elena another time. On the ride back Jill told me I could just pay for a single ride on board, so I did that.
The ride back through the Grand Canal stunned me. At first I was texting with Ken and just looking down. Then at seat opened up right in the front of the boat (a tourist’s dream) and so I sat. Venice is so unbelievably beautiful. The views from the vap just choked me up. At first I was amazed how very busy the water was with so many boats:

But then I started just focusing a bit over the boats and was overwhelmed with my good fortune at being here, in this beautiful city, for such a generous amount of time. I am a happy camper.
Ken met me near Ciak and we went, on Jill’s recommendation, to Nomboli for a quick lunch. I had “La Serinissima” tramzzino, with tuna and a salsa rosa and a spritz. Can’t wait to go back there and try some of the other things. Jill said they have a great vegetable plate, too.
Rest time was short because I wanted to do something in the afternoon before the predicted rain. It never did rain but we went over the Rialto bridge to talk to someone in the ticket booth about adding some rides onto our cards. She told me that the machines weren’t working right. (We are thinking that maybe it had to do with the internet being down all over town, including ours, for most of the day???) Anyway, we got 10 more rides each. Things in that Rialto area are super crowded but it really didn’t take us long to escape the crowds as we headed to Santo Stefano. We visited that beautiful church:




and the San Vidal.
on the San Marco side of the Accademia Bridge there is a new sculpture in the yard which is all bicycles stacked way high:

There is some kind of contemporary museum in that building now but we didn’t go inside.
We walked back, stopping at Pantagrulica for some prosciutto and salami. For me, I like his salami the best so far; Ken is reserving judgement.
Ken got gelato at Il Doge and I resisted (an amazing feat) because I had Tonolo on my mind. We did top there and I got a bag of assorted, and quite delicious, cookies for dessert, after dinner.
We were just lazy the rest of the day. Dinner was simple–the meats, fresh bread and I cooked some zucchini.
Thanks to a hint from Nan, we can now get Netflix on Ken’s iPad so we started watching Breaking Bad–first show, first season. I figure if we get really bad weather we can just binge on that.