How to do Venice in 5 hours with your in-laws

Venice is absolutely unique, but you can get an accurate taste in about five hours. Here's how:

Hour One in Venice

Wander around from the train station through the tiny streets and over beautiful bridges. DO NOT use a map on your phone to navigate! Don't try to find anything specific. Just wander. Enjoy the sights and sounds and sun. Backtrack several times because I am really good at finding dead-ends.

Hour Two in Venice

Find some food. I'd love to recommend some amazing restaurants for you, but really you won't be let down if you can get away from the main shopping streets (typically the path between Ponte di Rialto and Piazza San Marco), and find a menu that doesn't have photos on it or a restaurant without a guy trying to lure you in. Heck, even if you let yourself be lured, you (probably) won't be let down.

Hour Three in Venice

Meander over to Piazza San Marco. Listen to an audio guide (they're free from the internet! We once again turned to Rick Steves after our success in Rome).

Hour Four in Venice

Get in line for the Basilica. Be told by the security guard that your husband can't take his backpack in. Wait for him on the steps inside the basilica, assuming he is taking his backpack to the free lockers. After ten minutes, wonder where the heck he is and tell your in-laws you are going to look for him since he doesn't have a working phone in Italy. Take seventeen steps outside and find him sitting alone on a step, very cold, since he assumed we had left him to fend for himself in the wilderness while we listened to another audio guide, having not actually heard that there were lockers. Tell him there are indeed FREE lockers, wait for him to put his backpack in a locker — for realz this time. Look at the basilica. Retrieve backpack twenty minutes later. (Hour four is optional.)

Hour Five in Venice

Decide you are all ready to head back to the Airbnb since we now have a solid idea of what Venice is and how it works and the beauty and the canals and the gondolas and blah blah blah, plus you are all rather tired of being cold and the sun is setting. Wander back through the alleys while the sun sets. Marvel at the fact that you have not only survived, but thoroughly enjoyed, three weeks with your husband and in-laws on a vacation.

Rome Day 3: Audio tours FTW

Today was full of ancient ruins! The Colosseum and Roman Forum are central to Rome's ancient history, and they're mighty impressive to look at. But even though I was here in 2012 and saw both I didn't take a tour, and of course I didn't look up any information before this trip because that would have been sensible.

Enter: The Rick Steves Audio Tours. If you've traveled much, you know the name Rick Steves. If you're like me and grew up on a television diet of PBS, you know him from the Saturday afternoon lineup (probably right after Bob Ross). He's a be-khakied, be-polo-shirted Very Nice Dude who has traveled the world and he brings it to your living room in soft-spoken, digestible 30-minute nuggets. It's delightful! And today we learned, he has an app for Europe. Day = enriched.

All four of us were able to download audio tours of the Colosseum and Roman Forum, then plug in our ear buds and meander on our own through the buildings and ruins. It worked really well for our group. We kind of stayed together without having to stay together or talk to each other. Plus we were still able to talk about what we learned afterwards. Each tour took about an hour start-to-finish, so if you play your cards right — or skip the line by buying your tickets ahead of time (this link is not an endorsement!) — you could easily get to both of these sights before noon. We took a bit longer than that, but we also didn't have a whole heckuva lot else to do today, so we definitely meandered more than we might have if today were our first day.

 

We also ate some delicious pizza, fried anchovies (surprisingly delicious!), perfect pasta, and of course MOAR GELATO. Because when you're in Rome, the food is as much of an attraction as anything else.

For those of you keeping track at home, today makes three gelatos in three days. Batting 1.000! I've tried lemongrass, pear and cheese, strawberry, giuliano chocolate (traditional Italian flavor), and "black passion" which was mega chocolate plus berries. OM NOM NOM.