Venice

Now that we're back home, we finally have some high speed internet so I can get some of the 5-6 thousand pictures we took in Italy up on the blog.  We "discovered" staying in camping villages which are a very reasonable way to travel throughout Europe with a family in tow.  We were getting large 4-6 person mobile homes with complete kitchens, two bedrooms (usually two bathrooms), a full covered terrace and often a barbecue for less than half the cost of double hotel room.  Best of all, these camping villages are like Caribbean all inclusives in that they have great water parks, nightly entertainment and activities for the kids such as archery, etc.  |The downside was that they usually required you to travel to a single area for wifi and since I'm uploading thousands of pictures, I had better things to do than to sit around watching the indicator move - hence letting the blog lapse.

We had tried our first camping village outside of Arles in France and did another just outside of Nice but in Chamonix because we arrived between seasons had to settle for a hotel room.  Same for Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria but once we got to Italy, we found a huge one just outside Venice called Union Lido.  They had everything from water slides to ocean front.  We spent almost a week there and only made it into Venice once (which was enough for us).  The day we went into Venice it started out raining and very cloudy which is reflected in some of the pictures but as the day progressed, the clouds went away and we had some great, hot, weather.  From then on in Italy, we had fantastic weather.  

Venice was a great spot to spend most of a day, and we wandered up and down every alley it seemed crossing dozens of bridges but at the end of the day we were happy to get back to our new home and chill.  The previous 10 days or so was very hectic and we appreciated the opportunity to just relax and recharge the batteries.

Our beach on the Adriatic... Too cold to swim though.  

There goes 007 with his latest Russian secret agent lady friend 

I did not know that...  I guess those Swiss still need a salt water port for the latest challenge. 

This is "only" the 28th largest in the world at just over 301' long.  It's owned by Alberto Bailleres... The second richest Mexican.  It cost over $300M to build. I don't think it will fit in any of the canals though! 

I guess Bond got rid of the bad guys.