Cars, Planes, Buses, and Boats

While the landscape over France proved to be mostly green farmland, we quickly found ourselves over mountains that easily compare to the Rockies. The mountains north of Venice were all snow packed but the scene quickly changed as we headed into the valley surrounding Venice. We were happy to see our bags made the entire trip with us, and before long we were on a 5 minute walk down to the pier where the water taxis were all waiting for us. It took us about 30-40 minutes by water taxi from the airport to the Hilton on Gudecca. As you can see in the photos above, our taxi ride away from the Marco Polo Airport was very much like a shore excursion in itself. It was 80 degrees and humid, it was 5AM in Chicago, and we had now been on just about every mode of public transportation you can imagine in the previous 12 hours but most importanly we were on vacation, and nothing else seemed to matter.