the Brussels Adventure: Venice

Well, it's been a while since I've posted an update, but at least I have a good excuse... If you haven' t heard through the grapevine... we are expecting!! The baby is due October 26, 2011. Isaiah was due October 26th, 2009- what a fun that our first two are due exactly 2 years apart! The first trimester was pretty terrible, but we made it through and I'm feeling much better :) This week we are at 17 weeks and I've been feeling the baby move now for about 2 weeks, which is so wonderful! In all the business of staying all day next to a toilet I wasn't quite up to blogging, so we are going to be back-tracking a bit, and we'll start with Venice.

In February, Ben took me to Venice for the weekend to celebrate out Valentines day- very romantic :) The great thing about Europe is that you can, very affordable, do things like "going to Venice for the weekend." There is a great, cheap airline called Ryan AIR that flies discount, so we got out tickets in the neighborhood of 25 euros a piece...not bad! We even left Isaiah with some good friends here, so it was our first real "vacation" solos.

The famous Accademia Bridge- build as a temporary bridge in the 1930's, the locals liked it and never took it down.

There are no cars in Venice, so our main activity was walking. We literally walked almost the entire city a few times over. All the guide books said that the best thing to do was to wander around and "get lost." It's not that big, so you aren't really ever that lost. We had a great time exploring little neighborhoods, churches, small shops, etc. Venice was different from all the places we've been, which was great! Walking around at night was so peaceful because everything was very calm; no car noises, the gentle lapping of the water as we crossed our 200th bridge...really very serene. Doge's Palace was another highlight. It was simply enormous! The biggest disappointment (aside from the food...we always struggle to find good food in Italy...) was the "famous" bridge of sighs. It is a tiny bridge that prisoners used to cross and take their last look at the beauty of Venice (hence the "sighing"), but for all its hype, it was really very uninteresting and TINY! I didn't even take a picture of it... *sigh*