Scary House

Villa Morosini-XXV Aprile in Mirano, Italy. It wasn't too far from our hotel, and in a nice park. As I was taking this picture, the groundskeeper of the park was patiently waiting for me so he could lock the gate. It was nice that he didn't lock us in.

Laundry Day in Venice

Gondola Crossing?

Not sure what this sign means, but I like it.

Venice Sunset

We don't see sunsets much, kinda living in a valley in a city on the ground floor and all. So it was nice being on a boat in Venice at sunset.

Gondola Bits

A Grate Picture of Venice

One of my "grate-est", in fact.

Pescheria

I love how Italy is full of beautiful & crumbly buildings. This is actually above the entrance to a grocery store.

Wanted: Two Gentlemen of Verona

While we were in Verona, this helicopter was searching for something. It made several passes over us before we got bored and found some ice cream.

The Moon over Verona

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

Update:



Here is a similar photo, but with different moon positioning. (The moon was being a good model that morning.)

For Tom & Jan

We were kinda sorta doing a cheap wine tour of Northeast Italy the first week of October. The nice thing is that cheap wine in Italy is generally very drinkable. It's cheap as in economical, not as in tacky or sleazy.

Well, we saw this Chardonnay from Italy and as we know form their kinda sorta recent visit, Dad & Jan like chardonnays, so we decided to try it out and see what we were missing.



Yes, a nice 1 liter box of wine from Italy. It's so much easier and more convenient to throw one of these in the backpack and camp out along the river for a picnic. It's lighter. There's no chance of breakage. And it's re-sealable. With this, our collapsable plastic travel cup, and some cubes of fresh(ish) Parmesan cheese, we have perfected the art of the portable, impromptu wine tasting experience.

The Bill...

So, it turns out that the final cost of repairing my lens is €570. Ouch. That's only about €100 less than buying a new one. (The price has dropped a bit since the day I bought it...)

Apparently, contrary to my initial evaluation, the optics were damaged, along with the auto-focus mechanism.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

That's my initial, nerdiest assessment of Venice.
More to come, later.

Seriously.