When Lena turned fifty in the middle of May we wanted to celebrate somewhere we had never been, but it had to be close since we could only take a few days off from work. I'm not sure why I thought of Venice, but Lena jumped at the idea. I on the other hand was worried about winding up in a tourist trap with thousands of visitors getting that "tick in the box", while street vendors sell souvenirs of Venice made that are in China. Around 30,000,000 people visit Venice each year. Many of them are there for a single day as their cruise ship sails from port to port. The photographs I have seen made it clear that Venice is beautiful, so I wasn't going to let a few million tourists get in our way...
continued on:
http://blog.catchlight.se/2014/06/venice-tale-of-two-cities-day-1.html