Sunday, May 31, 2009

Ponte di Rialto, Venice, Italy

Ponte di Rialto is the bridge that comes to mind when you think of Venice. Construction began in 1588 replacing previous wooden bridges.

Our gondola ride took us right under it.

We ate dinner in a sidewalk restaurant just West of the bridge.

The wikipedia article is here and there is a good website on it here.



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Sunday, May 24, 2009

Hotel Antica Locanda al Gambero, Venice, Italy

In Venice, we stayed at Hotel Antica Locanda al Gambero. Let's just say it wasn't the easiest place to find (nothing in Venice is). But it was well worth the search.

There's a nice restaurant on the ground floor. The hotel office is on the next floor. We had a second floor room. Remember, they count the floors differently in Europe. Oh, and there's no elevator. The room was the nicest we had on that trip. The walls were covered in gorgeous fabric! The bathroom was awesome. I wish we could have stayed there longer.

There's a long story of how we made our reservations there that I'll share over a glass of fine Italian wine.

Their web site is here and TripAdvisor's review is here.

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Monday, May 18, 2009

Noonan Shore, PEI, Canada

One day while we were just riding around on PEI, I wanted to get a good view of the Confederation Bridge so I found the road closest to the bridge and followed it down to the Northumberland Strait. This road was Noonan Shore Road.

What a discovery I made at the end of the road. There was this old fishing boat tied up but the tide had gone out and left it high and dry.

The blues and reds in the boat perfectly matched the red sands and the blue water and sky. Awesome!

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Sunday, May 10, 2009

San Lorenzo Market, Florence, Italy

Another destination nearby our Hotel Casci in Florence was the San Lorenzo market. If you can't find what you're looking for there, it doesn't exist. We bought leather goods there that weren't fashionable back in the States for almost 2 years.

As typical in Europe be sure to haggle with the sellers. You can always get a better price than is posted.

Here's the street view and here are some comments from TripAdvisor.


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Sunday, May 03, 2009

Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Italy

Just down the street from Hotel Casci is the Galleria dell'Accademia. In this museum is an entire wing full of Michelangelo's works including the iconic David.

Although there were signs all around the statue admonishing to not take photos, flashes were popping all around so I finally pulled my camera out and took a couple.

After we had seen everything in that wing, we walked through a small passageway into the rest of the museum. In that passageway was a door, like into a service closet. Except the wall around this mundane doorway was painted to look like an elaborate entrance way. I was amazed.

So I snatched out my camera and started taking pictures. Instantly a guard approached me and begin warning me to not take pictures or he would confiscate my camera! You'll see I got one anyway.

The wikipedia page is here and their web site is here.



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