Day 30 – Hung on a horse

I don’t know that I’ll ever quite get the balance of travel clothing right. We’re definitely getting better, lighter, but there’s always something. This time, for me, it’s the T-Shirt / sock balance, too many of the one, not enough of the other. I’ve been doubling up against the cold on the short cotton socks and after about two weeks, pulled the left-side double pair apart with a crisp little crack and a puff of dead-skin-dust just as the toes separated. A sure sign of the need for a third pair. Di suggested I should conduct the right side sock-separation elsewhere than her pillow and perhaps outside. Fair call. I gave them a nice little aromatherapathic swing on the way out (FOMO prevention for Di) and completed the second procedure outside. Really getting to know one another – that’s what traveling’s about.

Clad in fresh T-shirts (at least), we head out, early this morning, as the two front seats on the 2:40pm bus to Cortina had our name on them. A thick, cold, fog meets us at the door to our little piazza, the vapour creeping in from the lagoon, down the canals, under the old bridges and into the alley ways, chilling the very bones of the city.

Dark forms flow past the end of passages cloaked in mist, footsteps can be heard on the wet stone and voices are muffled slightly, in the dank air, as we wend our way to the Rialto.

We head first to the teatra la fenice. We can’t find it in the fog (and there’s not much to see from outside anyway), but hear singing. Along the canal comes three gondolas, the first with a guitarist and tenor belting out an opera number.

The voice guides us to the theatre’s canal access where we watch a blevy of gondolas pass – clearly the theatre is on the ‘artistic’ gondola circuit. They pass under a small bridge one by one until a barge comes along behind them. It looks too large but in another of those canal chaos miracles, pushes through.

We head now to the spiral stair case (palazzo contarini del bovolo) and find it, but it’s not open till ten – so we take some snaps and move on. It’s worth noting that the photos make the palazzo look like it’s out in the middle of an open square. In reality it’s down some tiny back alleys in a square the size of a small bathroom. They must’ve photographed it three blocks away through the first floor bathrooms of three apartment blocks – but that’s holiday brochures for you.

Coffee time at a corner cafe we’d enjoyed on the first day, this time with an elderly lady, in a full length fur and red woolen cap. She seems to know everyone and there’s many bonjournos an chiaos.

Peggy Guggenheim’s art gallery is sensational. There’s some Picasso’s and quite a number of Jackson Pollack’s works (It seems Peggy pretty much got him started), heaps of others of course but they were the big names. I liked the horse.

What’s really cool is that Peggy lived here. It’s an amazing place with a lovely garden and a back that opens right onto the canal..

Di picks “the Corner Pub” for lunch and it’s a place we’d go back to. It has a small room out the back with five tables, low timber beams and a couple of windows out to the canal and a stone bridge.

A vaporetto ride back to our stop, pick up the bags from the bnb then off to the bus station for the ATVO. Turns out we have to change at the airport and there’s a transfer gap so – pleenty of time.

A stunning bus trip North to Cortina, first across the flats as the sun sets then a long, slow climb winding up into the dolomites, the last sun catching the tips of the 250 million year old limestone cliffs that loom up before us.

We arrive on dusk, find the Alaska, an easy walk from the bus station, and head to our room after a big day. Our box of ski boots from Con the fruiterer is waiting for us.