Not as early of a start today for our tour so we decided to go back to St Mark’s Square for breakfast at one of the cafes there. On our journey, we got to see one of the “real life” tasks in a city with no vehicles, the trash boat making pickups from all of the various apartment buildings and businesses.

We found where our tour was meeting and met “John”, who we later found out was Giovanni.

He led us over to our water taxi, our driver was Johnny. Beautiful boat, we satin the back section with our new friends from Australia. A group of five, mother, daughter, granddaughter and the mother’s best friend and the daughter’s best friend. They had already been to Barcelona and would be heading to Florence, like us, tomorrow.

We first went to Murano where we went to a glass blowing workshop. Today is Italy’s Labor Day so a lot of places are closed and most of the workers here are off but they had a few people working in the workshop. He demonstrated two types of working with glass, glassblowing and then using tools to shape it. He started with a horse and then did a vase with color in it. Simply beautiful. Then we had the option to go through their gallery and gift shop or visit the town. LJ stuck with the gallery and Barry, Brenda and I headed to town. It was just a few minute walk and we were getting hungry for lunch. Most places were closed, one restaurant option was going to be too long for our timeframe and so… we found gelato! maybe we won’t let LJ know about this little snack but it should hold us over u til our next stop.

Burano is full of colorful homes like San Juan and a few other Caribbean islands. We couldn’t dock next to the wall so we actually docked next to another boat, much larger and very nice, and walked through it and then onto land, we’ve never done this before.

We went directly to a lace shop. There was an older lady there who was sewing lace. Another woman told us some history of the lace making and the artists. The small piece she showed us had seven different women work on it for many days. Each lady has a specific type of stitch they specialize in. Unfortunately, the art is dying out as there are not people interested in training in it, there are not enough sales and the artists are not compensated very well.

Afterwards LJ went off to photograph the island and we went to find lunch. We ordered calamari and pizza and they were both very tasty.

LJ found us at the end of lunch, he had bought some “S” cookies. They are Venetian butter cookies which we had read about prior to the trip. They are actually Bussola cookies, not too sweet and some have a slight lemon flavor.

We returned to the water taxi, this time docked at the wall and headed back to Venice. It was a very interesting day. We decided our little afternoon rest the day before had worked well so we headed back towards the apartment. Fortunately on our way, LJ spotted a suitcase that would work to replace the damaged one ($79 Euro) as we had not heard back from Delta and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow so traveling with a large hole in the suitcase really wasn’t going to work. LJ and I also enjoyed a crepe in the square where our tour began yesterday. Mine was filled with Nutella and bananas and it was delicious!

After our siesta, we headed out for our last dinner in Venice.

Don’t worry! We found gelato!!! And… LJ’s step count for the end of the day on Monday.