Today we spend most of the day getting from Venice to Ravenna. It shouldn’t have taken so long but we managed to make a series of errors followed by not being able to find our hotel.
Sarah seems a bit better and we are looking forward to seeing a new city. Venice is covered once again in an icy fog and the trip on the vaporetto is pretty chilly. We pick up the car and are off. We decide to take the autostrada due to the heavy fog. The coast road which we’ve driven on once before would be too dangerous without unobstructed views. But our GPS does not want us to take the longer route. So we turn him off and go by memory of the Google map we’ve seen this morning. We cannot find our map of Italy which turns out being in my purse. (my bad)
All goes smoothly until Bologna and then we take a road marked Ravenna. It is a slow two lane road winding through little towns, much more interesting now that the fog has dissipated but much slower. We stop for some fast food lunch and get to Ravenna around 3 PM.
Problem is, we cannot find the hotel. The GPS is pointing into the pedestrian zone where we cannot drive. We ask for directions twice. Finally we park the car and get out and walk. Once inside the pedestrian zone we find it right away. John parks the car in their lot and we head up to our rooms. Up is the operative word. The rooms start at the end of a long staircase on the second floor and ours is up another long staircase. I was careful to book places with elevators. I guess I must have made a mistake. So I hobble up all these stairs and we have a cute two room suite under the eaves.
We were in Ravenna 10 years ago when we first made this trip with Sarah. John and Sarah remember this great restaurant where they had pigeon and fried baby eels (with little eyes, I remember that!) They are much more adventurous eaters than I. We find the restaurant but they are closed due to an event. That’s two days in a row that we’ve gone to places closed for a special event. They point us up the street to another restaurant called Melarancia. I order white wine with a dish that calls for red wine. Obviously I am some sort of philistine. I think maybe I should explain how I can’t drink red wine because of a histamine allergy but who cares, I’ll never see this set of waiters again. So I eat my undercooked fetuccine with its salty meat sauce and wash it down with an inappropriate white wine. John and Sarah fare better. It is time for this day to end.
