Is it that time of year again?

 In fact, not only is that time of year where tradition has it that I will blog a post per day, but in fact I am 4 days late to the party having missed the usual kick off on the first of the month. It did not occur to me until today that I had neglected the start date mainly I suspect because I was off on my travels again although not for work but much more importantly to celebrate a major wedding anniversary. 

E. and I met up in Venice for a few days although the actual anniversary was a few weeks ago. This was my second trip, my first coming many moons ago during a youthful inter-railing trip with my mate J. We had travelled through Holland, Germany, and Austria with an extremely optimistic accommodation  budget of GBP15 per day with the  intention that when we arrived in the supposedly cheaper countries of Italy and Greece we could find somewhere suitable for GBP10 per day.

Even staying in the Lido on the mainland, this proved to be a challenge in Venice and despite staying in the cheapest campsite we could find, we were significantly eating into our financial resources.

We were also absolutely hopeless at putting up our tent (it had been borrowed from someone who had neglected to include the instructions so we had a assumed that the rods used to provide the frame of the tent needed to be hammered into the ground - this proved virtually impossible as the sun hardened earth was like concrete and the rods were quite thick so even with pouring our precious supplies of mineral water to soften the earth,  our efforts to create a stable structure were to  little avail and our 2 man tent had an alarming sag in the middle) and tempers were getting frayed when I spotted an identical model to our tent close by. 

That tent, however,  was around twice the capacity of ours due, it transpired when I asked the owner to give us some pointers, to the fact that the rods were supposed to be inserted in the material around the edge of the canvas to give it its shape (rather than being planted in to the ground) and the actual tethering of the tent was by hammering the tent pegs into the ground and tightening the chords. Genius. This transformed our tenting experience.

Nevertheless the cost of the campsite was significantly higher than our budget allowed which left roughly enough to take a vaporetto to St Mark’s square but not enough money to actually go into St Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace next door. This explained why St Mark’s square looked reasonably familiar but that the extraordinarily beautiful interior of the Church (and the treasures of the Doge’s Palace) rang no bells at all for me - a WhatsApp to J confirming that its was not simply poor memory on my part but a desire to eat last time we were in town that caused us to miss this visual treat.

E. and I more that made up for that this trip and our high step count over the 3 days we were there was testament to our vast intake of cultural delights - we also managed a trip to the Galleries d’Academicia and the Peggy Guggenheim Museum as well as the Opera - a terrific trip and I hope a good enough reason for delaying my participation on the blog per day challenge until today.