Arriving in Venice, we were greeted by our tour manager, Ambra; beautiful italian name, it means Amber in English. We claimed our luggage and hop on the bus to Mestre, a suburb of Venice region and met Lucas, our bus driver. An interesting gentleman to say the least. Sorry, I don’t seem to find a picture of his. He reminds me of a younger french actor, Gerard Depardieu.

Silly me. I though we were going to have different tour guides and drivers for each of the cities we visited, which we did have local guides but were attached to the hips to Ambra and Lucas for the entire the trip. They were the main guides and no complains here. Well, at least from me. There is however, one or two people who were not happy. Oh well, you cannot satisfy everyone. And moving right along we did, discovering Italy we were on our way.

The weather was beautiful with bright sunshine and clear blue skies. It was hard to believe that we were actually in Italy after looking forward to this trip for more then a year. We had many pancakes scrambled eggs, sausage, orange juice breakfasts, count eight, garage sales and an Italian night dinner fundraiser to help us achieve our dream, but like troops, they came rushing supporting us all the way.

We finally arrived at Antony Hotel in Mestre, a suburb of Venice.