Florence to Venice 24 July - Maverick scribed by John

Skwaaaaarrrrk! Bon Giorno, Bon Kakapo, it's off to Venice we go! It seems Europeans love trains as you can get a train from pretty much anywhere to anywhere and there are small cute local trains, rugged mountain trains, double decker trains, slow trains that stop everywhere and fast trains that hardly stop anywhere! Then there are the super fast pointy nosed bullet trains - they look pretty mean in a 'don't mess with me' sort of way. It's a shame that trains are about as rare as I am back in New Zealand.

We are travelling to Venice from Florence - by train of course - and are looking forward to watching the countryside from the window. So why is it so dark in this train with no views at all? It turns out that this is a brand new high speed line and it didn't want views and things to slow it down so 75.8km of the first 78km are in tunnels! That's as long as my lake back home! It cost five billion euros. I'm not sure how much a euro is, but I know five billion of anything is quite a lot.

Soon we are in Venice. It's an island so the train gets there on a long bridge and has to go very slowly because everything in Venice is balanced on hundreds of sticks that have been pushed into the mud. Even the great big churches. There are no cars here and everyone walks everywhere which makes me feel right at home. The streets are so thin in places I can touch them with my wingtips. I think they made a big mistake when they build all the roads here because they are underwater and you have to use boats to get around. There are Police and Ambulance boats, bus boats, delivery boats, garbage boats and strange canoe shaped boats where the driver has to stand up and carefully balance at one end with a large stick and avoid all the other boats going crazily fast. Strange.

The family have to stop every so often for something called 'gelato' it's a habit they have developed since arriving in Italy. It comes in every flavour except bird seed flavour, which is a bit disappointing.

It's a short walk up and over some bridges to our home for the next couple of nights which turns out to be a large apartment with space for everyone to have their own separate perch - no sharing of rooms which is a real treat. There is a strange contraption called a 'whirlpool bath' which Sam enjoys. It makes loud scary noises, not my idea of relaxing at all. John says that things were just different in the 70s, whatever that means.