Italia: Day 1

So we finally left RDU after two false starts. The first flight, delayed by mechanical problems, left RDU too late to make connections in Philadelphia for Venice. The second actually had us boarding a plane for Boston for a flight to Zurich which Swiss Air would not accept ... after going throught detailed screening just short of body cavity checks. Some two hours later, we were again on our way with a flight to Philadelphia, with connections through Frankfurt, to Venice. We, of course, sat on the ground in Raleigh for 45 minutes while the airline determined that the source of a fluid leak in the #1 engine of our ancient Boeing 737 was not really important.


Our bags, of course, stayed in Frankfurt, while we traveled on to Venice. Need I name the airline?


Here -- some 6 hours late -- is the CFO on a water taxi in Venice on the way to our hotel.


And, here's our taxi driver, a New York cab driver in a boat. Hey, you have to die sometime!

We arrived at the hotel, minus luggage, and had dinner with the group of people we will be traveling with the next couple of weeks.


I decided to take a shower before dinner and ... well ... use the fracilities. OK, a john is a john but exactly how do you flush the thing? After considerable study, I tried the nice piece of modern sculpture some 5 feet off the floor on the side wall. Success!


At dinner, a great debate ensued over whether we are dining on fish or chicken. I vote for Chicken of the Sea, but our waiter insisted it was sardines. After losing a 2 Euro bet with the barkeep over whether this guy from California can remove the cork from inside a wine bottle without breaking the bottle (his wuife did), we established it was, indeed, chicken.

Oh, well, the wine was good.

The bus leaves at 8:30 in the morning.