venice

for the last few days of our european adventure, jo and i took a train a few hours north to venice. it was a quiet ride, and i could tell that our exhaustion from travelling for four weeks was catching up to both of us. luckily, venice turned into the most relaxing part of our entire trip.

we stayed at a hostel just outside of venice. it is way to expensive for us budget travellers to stay within venice's watery border so we bussed it in every morning and out every night.

there's not a lot to tell from our days in venice. of course we stopped by san marco square, visited a couple small museums and took the waterboat as our alternative gondola ride. but honestly, our three days in venice were spent as the following: 1) have a drink at a waterside pub. 2) move next door to the pizza place for a long lunch. 3) walk along the water and stop for some gelatto. 4) move a couple pubs over and have another drink. 5) time for supper...yet another restaurant on the water. it went on like this for all three days. browsing the venitian streets mixed with occasional gelatto stops and always including multiple drinks and meals along the water. we were able to chat all day, every day. about our trip, about our lives, about things maybe we would have never discussed had we not had a chair, the sun and an italian pizza in front of us. i couldn't have pictured venice any better.

our european adventure would come to a close as we took the same extraordinarily long trip back to tilburg, falling asleep on the train as we did so. our last day in europe together was canada day and was spent wearing our matching canada t-shirts (which had sounded great in theory, but once we stepped into the centre, we realized exactly how incredibly loserish we looked to others :P), sitting on the terrace, playing like children in the sprinklers in the middle of the square and at night, introducing martijn to the english version of aladdin (complete with robin williams - i honestly don't know how it can be watched with any other genie).

i slept heavenly that night. one thing i realized from the month long jaunt around europe...i'm not cut out for long term travel. i love travelling!! but give me a few weeks at home first before i'm off on my next adventure ;). i was glad at the end of our trip to stay put in tilburg for a while and have the best summer of my life ahead of me.