On my way to travel from Greece to Slovenia, I had 11 hours between when my flight landed in Venice at 10:30 AM and when my train left at 9:30 PM. Between getting baggage, getting from the airport to the city, etc, that would leave me 9 or 10 hours to explore Venice. What to do in that time?
About half way through my trip in Greece, I realized what I would do in Venice. Laundry. As unglamorous as it sounds, it needed to be done. There was nowhere to do it my last couple of days in Greece, and I didn’t want to have to worry about it when John got here. So, I had it all figured out. My guidebook mentioned a laundromat near the train station. The trip from the airport to the city takes you right past the train station. So, I would head in, do the laundry, stash the bags at the luggage check at the train station (all of which would take 3-4 hours at the most), then have much of the day left to explore Venice. Perfect plan.
The only hitch was, it is really hard to do laundry when you don’t have dirty clothes. Or any clothes but what you are wearing. The airline must have forgot to put a cart of bags on the plane, since about 15 people on my flight were missing their baggage. They didn’t know where the baggage was, but “could deliver it to my hotel“. Except for the fact that I had a 9 PM train to Slovenia, which got there in the middle of the night. Then I would leave on a bus at 11 AM for the adventure place, remote in the hills and woods of Slovenia. Then a night train to Split, Croatia, the a boat to Korcula, where we don’t yet have a hotel booked. Nowhere to deliver bags to for days. But, with luck, they could get there during the day.
So, I took the bus to the city. I took one of the bus-type boats through the Grand Canal of the city, on which I scored a front seat with great views! I followed Rick Steves’ self guided boat tour, learning about the city as I went. I then wandered through San Marco, the big touristy area for a couple of hours. It was all beautiful, but the whole time, I was worried that I wouldn’t have my bags, and I was trying to figure out how I would manage several days of rafting, climbing, etc in Slovenia with no bathing suit and only one set of clothes.
Luckily, when I called the airport at 3, they had my bag. I went all the way back to the airport to get it, had time to come back and do laundry. Unfortunately the Laundromat near the train station closed a year ago, so I had to walk through the entire city to get another one (the whole time wishing I was doing it at 11 AM instead of 6 PM and close to my train departure). I paid way to much to do laundry, but in the end, I had clean clothes, and the chance to take another of Venice’s famous boats through the canal, this time at night, on the way back to catch my train. A beautiful city, except for a few hours spent dealing with the bag, and a few more worried about the bag!
you could just put your clothes in the water behind the boat...if you really were in Venice, you surely would have done this. but since you're in a house being renovated and temporarily w/o water or electricity, you concocted this elaborate story about trying to find a laundromat. you fool no one!
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