Getting there

Sunday 18th to Tuesday 20th August

Sometimes I feel that the hardest part of the holiday is arriving at the start of it. Travelling there generally takes 1 day. This time it took 2 days. Compromise!

My holiday involved travelling to Venice, staying for 3 nights and then embarking on a cruise for a week, finishing up back in Venice. I had booked with three Australian friends. All three had been staying at my house in the days prior to leaving.

I’m a bit of a last-minute merchant and would probably have caught the Gatwick coach on Tuesday morning about 9:15, arriving in time for the 14:40 flight (as long as there were no crashes on the motorway). The others were more circumspect, especially as one of them has even more trouble getting up in the morning than I have. We left the afternoon before.

Sunday was a time to pack, and then to repack as Margaret and Wadia tried to fit all their belongings into the 20kg suitcase allowance for Easyjet, with the rest crammed into our hand luggage. We managed so well that when weighed at the airport we were about 8kg short, though I hate to say how heavy our hand luggage must have been.

On Monday we organised ourselves and the house and by 2:15 we were all out the door for the short walk to the end of my street to catch my local bus to Oxford, followed by the Gatwick coach from the bus stop around the corner. Simple! (Apart from the rush-hour traffic jam on the M25, of course.)

Following advice and lots of checking on the internet, we had booked into the Holiday Inn at the Gatwick North Terminal, although we were departing from the South Terminal. Everything was very easy. Our rooms were clean. There was a restaurant in the hotel. Wadia and I went for a walk after dinner and found our route ready for the next day. We met up at midday on Tuesday and caught the transit train to the South terminal, found a wheelchair for Sue, which gave all of us speedy access as well as motorised travel to our gate, which was the furthest one in the airport. Fantastic.

On our arrival in Venice we took the easy way to our hotel – a water taxi right to the hotel’s water door. It’s a great experience. To my amusement, I think I was put in the same hotel room I had last time. It certainly had the same view over a courtyard, while the others had a view over the canal, again like last time. I had a double bed while Sue’s was single – again, like last time.

After dinner at a nearby open-air restaurant, we wandered down to San Marco to take photographs and remind ourselves that we had finally arrived in Venice.