Our Family Trip to Italy Itinerary: Venice!
We’re back!… from a carefully planned and long-anticipated tour of Italy, and it was everything we had hoped it would be! Many of you remember our family of 6 took a trip to Europe back in 2015, and ever since, we have planned to go back to Italy to see more. And this was the year. Our family has changed in 8 years, as families tend to do, and we now have more people, including the tiny ones, which really changes things! For this trip, it was 7 of us: Dave and me, Lily and Lola, and Abby, Beau, and Juliet. Grant, Miriam, and Rosie have other travel plans this year, including missions work in Honduras, which is another adventure for them.
We credit Abby for planning much of this trip this time and finding some out-of-the-way destinations and points of interest for us that she had researched. We all contributed a few choices and ideas along the way, but she really did much of the planning leading up to the trip to make it as fun as possible! And she did a great job.
I shared some of our journey on Instagram along the way in Italy, and promised to come home and share more details of the itinerary here, so here we go! Two weeks abroad entails a lot of sights, so I will be breaking this trip up into several posts to give you the details. This is where we began–leaving the U.S. on my 50th birthday on an overnight flight and arriving in Venice around 9:30 in the morning local time.
We hit the ground running and went straight to get our rental cars (we got two of them). I will not be recommending the company we used for the rental as we had to wait for 2 1/2 hours outside in the sun for our cars, but we won’t dwell on that as everything past that was wonderful on this trip! I do recommend choosing a rental car company that has good reviews if you are driving! We had done all train travel on our previous trip, but since we were traveling so much in between cities, we needed cars this time.
Our hotel for Venice is the same one in which we stayed before and I would recommend it to anyone. It is the Hotel Bologna, situated directly across the street from the Venice Mestre (pronounced May-stray) train station, which takes you directly to the steps of the Grand Canal in Venice in about 10 minutes. If you have been to Venice, you are well aware that there are no cars, only boats, plenty of ancient stone walkways and over 400 bridges with lots of steps! Last time we had been advised of how difficult it can be to get your luggage from the train station to your hotel in Venice, which was the main reason we chose to stay just outside. Click HERE to read all about our first trip to Venice and more about the hotel!
I will note, both times we have been to Venice was with the family and at least 6 people, which is another reason to stay outside Venice. (Larger rooms that can accommodate us all.) However, if you are traveling as a couple and prefer the feel of the Old World charm, staying in Venice would be doable!
We spent the second half of that first day and the next full day in Venice, touring the streets, shopping, and eating! We love taking our time and strolling through, turning corners to see what’s coming up next. As we did on our last trip, once we made our way to St. Marks on that first evening, we took a boat back to the steps of the Grand Canal to catch the train back. It saves a lot of walking back and gives you an amazing view!
Since I had previously written about Venice on our trip before, I won’t repeat all of the details of shopping, etc., but I will just mention that the main great shopping you will find in Venice is leather, Murano glass, and the artistic Venetian masks. I was looking for a leather travel bag on this trip and I did find some good prices in Venice, but I ended up finding one later which I’ll tell you about in another post! The Murano glass is so pretty and it’s not as common in other areas of Italy so Venice is the place to find it from our experience.
One more note… everyone always wants to know what shoes to wear on trips with lots of walking! I always want sandals and Abby found some for us that we both love and they were perfect! I wore them 1/2 of the time and I wore my old ones I’ve had for years for 1/2 the time, depending on which outfit I was wearing! I’ve linked the new ones in my affiliate link HERE. The old ones are no longer made in my exact style, but similar ones are HERE.