March 22nd, Venice: How My Beloved, Rick Steves, Failed Me (Once) and Locanda Ca’ Zose, Dorsoduro

(Or how to get a stranger to come to your hotel room unexpectedly in the middle of the night). I am secretly in love (a little bit) with Rick Steves, but he failed me in Venice (just once). Rick Steves has a fantastic set of guide books and a free app, Rick Steves' Europe, which has audio tours for many major attractions in Europe. We used several in Venice: The Grand Canal Tour, San Marco's Square, San Marco's Basilica. These were excellent, even if we did look a little dorky constantly wearing our headphones:



And Ricky's guide books provided us with excellent practical information in navigating a foreign country, customs, and currency. With his advice, we tried to book Alessandro's Wine and Cicchetti tour. Unfortunately, Alessandro did not have 8 people signed up and it was cancelled. But because of our advance sleuthing (on youtube) we were able to identify some of the bars, and went on our own. Cicchetti are little appetizers that are a specialty of Venice wine bars, and it's hard to go wrong with wine in Italy:







Here are a few shots of our delightful little hotel, Locanda Ca' Zose, in the slightly less touristy area of Venice (excellent Rick Steves' advice):







Because I was also following Rick Steves' important advice about the light-weight suitcase, it was important to wash a few items of clothing out in the evenings. There was a very helpful heated towel rack and a laundry line in the shower. Unfortunately, the little doohicky that you slide the button into was missing. Not a problem; I just wrapped the end of the laundry line around the hook just outside the shower.

But because of Rick Steves' failure, we got a phone call our second night/early morning from the hotel desk. Dianna answered it and told the desk clerk to come on up to our room. He said he had to check the alarm in our room!!!!?????!!!! So I let him in and hopped back in bed (I wasn't awake!) Then he came out of the bathroom and said we needed to take our clothes off the alarm line. THE ALARM LINE! (It's important to note two things here: 1. Richard Steves never warned us about this alarm lines all over Venice, Florence and Rome and 2. This was close to 48 hours after we'd (I'd) been putting things on the clothes line, so how long were we suppose to remain dead in our shower before they checked on our bodies?)

Just think of this as PSA so you don't have to be mortified by the unexpected appearance of the very sweet man who also made us excellent cappuccini every morning.