Adriatic Trip, Day 1: To Venice

Monday-Tuesday, June 9-10, 2025

As I have done in the past, I am blogging a summary of our recent vacation trip. I will post daily installments offset by five weeks to allow time for editing and review after we return home.

Our “Adriatic trip” is actually shorthand for two trips stitched together. We had planned a cruise from Athens to Split, Croatia, with our friends Dave and Jan from the Kimberley trip last year. But since the cruise is only a little longer than a week, we looked for something either before or after. Dave and Jan found a NatHab trip to Croatia and Slovenia, but that trip was full, so we weren’t able to join them. Instead, we found a week-long tour visiting Venice, Florence, and Rome through Tauck Tours. The Italian trip was a good fit for us since Kenna hadn’t been to Italy previously, and I had only visited a small part of northern Italy in 1986 and on an earlier European tour when he was in high school.

Our travel agent gifted us an additional day at the hotel in Venice, allowing us to arrive a day early to acclimate to the time change and minimize the chances of disruption in case of any flight delays. We opted for a long layover in Frankfurt (7 hours) to further reduce the risk of missing a connecting flight. Access to the Lufthansa airline lounges made the layover quite bearable.

Upon arrival at the Venice airport, we were met by a representative of Tauck, who helped us with our luggage. One of the unique features of the Venice Airport, located on the mainland, is that it has a water taxi station to transport people to the islands of Venice. The Tauck representative walked us there and then rode the water taxi with us to our hotel, the Hilton Molino Stucky, and ensured we were checked in properly.

It was early evening at that point, and we had been well fed on the plane, so we took a walk. The hotel is across a channel from the central part of Venice on Giudecca Island. We walked down the north shore of the island almost to the end and back, passing many cafes and small restaurants along the water, getting glimpses of the main part of Venice across the water. Having gotten that exercise, we returned to the hotel, stopped at the hotel lobby bar for a drink and a snack, and crashed for the night.