We boarded Hayden’s first vaporetto, and the small boat was buzzing with excitement, full of foreigners so thrilled to be in their dream destination. I could easily spot the honeymooners (the men playing with their wedding rings, and the women still sporting wedding manicures and perfectly waxed eyebrows). There were also older couples, returning to Venice to relive the romantic locations of their courtship. Once we arrived on the main island, I converted the Kelty backpack to a stroller, and the two of us ambled along the edge of the canal as we enjoyed our first taste of sunshine in weeks.

(Sadly I only have mobile phone pictures for this trip, as the DSLR was too big to fit in the backpack)

A few hours later, we were reunited with mum and Josef. They hadn’t seen Hayden since he was four months old, so he was very excited to show off his new skills that included crawling, clapping, and eating solids. We all traipsed off to find dinner, and Hayden sampled a Caprese mozzarella and tomato salad while I caught up on news from Australia. Hayden seemed really happy to see his grandparents again, and even scored some complementary cookies from the waiter.

We spent the next day visiting the quieter islands of Murano and Burano. We admired the delicate stitching of lace in Burano and explored the canals lined with colourful houses. On the glass-blowing island of Murano, we watched three brothers working together to create a beautiful floral chandelier, then visited the showroom for a sampler of all the different pieces from the island. Mum bought me a striking blue and silver glass pendant for my birthday, a unique souvenir of our holiday.

After three nights in our delightful apartment amongst the rooftops of Venice, it was time to say goodbye with one final stroll along the Grand Canal. After their cruise, we will meet up with them again in Spain for a week in the foothills of the Sierra Blanca.

On Monday, as we had to catch the bus from Jen’s house to the train station, I made poor Adrian leave about five hours early to ensure that we wouldn’t be stuck in some sort of horrendous Roman traffic jam. Roma Termini was full of people – queueing, waiting, sleeping, and complaining. All tickets had been sold out for the rest of the week:

No seats were available in the train station, so we wedged ourselves and our luggage against a wall and waited for the minutes to tick past. We caught the train from Rome to Milan slowly north without incidence, and we were able to check into our hotel around 11:30pm. Our next train was set to depart at 7:10am. Adrian begged me not to make him get to the station five hours early again, and I agreed. I set both phones on to wake us up at 6:00am, and we even had time to grab a panini at the station before boarding our train to Zurich.

This was my favourite part of the route – what a difference between Italy and Switzerland, suddenly we were surrounded by snowy peaks, brightly washed houses, and crystal lakes. At lunch time we were in Zurich, grabbed some pizza and giant pretzels, then found our next train. I was so happy to finally see some sign of our progress:

As all the high-speed trains had been booked out, we had the rare chance of catching the INT90 from beginning to end, stopping at:

Zurich (Switzerland)
Baden (Switzerland)
Brugg (Switzerland)
Frick (Switzerland)
Stein-S (Switzerland)
Rheinfelden (Switzerland)
Basel (Switzerland)
St Louis Haut Rhin (France)
Mulhouse (France)
Colmar (France)
Selestat (France)
Strasbourg (France)
Metz (France)
Thionville (France)
Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Arlon (Belgium)
Libramont (Belgium)
Jemelle (Belgium)
Marloie (Belgium)
Namur (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Luxembourg (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Schuman (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Nord (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Central (Belgium)
Bruxelles-Midi (Belgium)

At one stage, I thought that the train announcer said “Nous n’arrivons jamais.” (We are never arriving), but quickly realised he was saying “Nous arrivons Jemelle (We are arriving in Jemelle), which was much better news. Later, when we first heard “Dames en heren” (Ladies and Gentlemen), all the Belgians cheered, because Flemish announcements meant that we were getting very close to home.

At 8pm that evening, we got off the train at the very last stop, pointed the way to the Eurostar for some stranded Brits, and then a short walk later were finally home with our kittens.

We go to the website, and it tells us that we cannot rebook online because we have already completed the online check-in procedure. We phone the call centre, but it is overloaded and we cannot connect. The call centre closes at 7pm GMT. We don’t know what to do. Do we book another ticket for Tuesday? Should we go with Ryanair or Brussels Airlines? Should we hire a car and drive, or catch a train all the way back to Brussels? We decide to see what the news is in the morning, and then go into town to assess the situation first-hand.

On Saturday morning, Adrian reads that the last time a volcano like Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 1821, it lasted for more than two years. We decide that we will not try to fly back to Brussels. We catch bus 38 to the train station, and try to find the end of the line for the international train tickets. This is the line:

While Adrian lines up, Lina helps me find the car hire booths. Every single company is completely out of cars. The people at the desks are just shaking their heads at anyone who approaches. One guy looks smug as he waves a reservation form. I bet he’s glad he booked ahead.

We wait in the line for 2.5 hours. The line is peppered with air passengers who flew into Rome and then had their connecting flights cancelled. The line for baggage storage is also daunting. Periodically, a staff member with a megaphone announces discouraging news like “No tickets to Paris until Wednesday”, and “There is an extra train to Madrid at 2pm. We can not issue reservations for this train. You will have to buy your tickets on the train”. We imagine the stampede that will happen that afternoon for those seats. Half of the ticket counters are closed, and there are only five staff members working. Each reservation takes at least 15 minutes to process. Often the ticket agents have to pull out rail maps of Europe to find an available route.

Finally, we reach the head of the line. I ask the ticket guy for tickets for the first train to Brussels. He shakes his head, “No trains left for today or tomorrow”, and seems to wave us away, like that’s that. “How about for the day after that?”, I ask. He looks very surprised, and I wonder if he has even looked up to see the line in front of him. A colleague comes and asks him what kind of sandwich he wants for lunch, and they discuss that for a while. However, he manages to find us train tickets from Rome-Milan, then Milan-Zurich-Basel-Strasbourg-Luxembourg-Brussels. We leave on Monday 19th April at 4:36pm and arrive on Tuesday 20th April at 19:51. We tell him that we’ll take it. For the two of us, the tickets are a total of 418.40 euro, plus 81 euro for a hotel for our 8 hour stopover in Milan.

We feel so lucky that we have tickets. As we returned home in a mass of people, I clutched my handbag fiercely, terrified that it would be stolen and remove our one chance at getting home. I still stroke the tickets occasionally, reassuring myself that we do have an escape from this mess. Our friend Lina is currently waiting at Rome airport, waiting to see if her flight to Australia via Malaysia will go ahead. In the meantime, we are holed up at Jenny’s apartment, doing our washing and hoping that we can return to our lives on Wednesday.

Our guide Maria took us on the Hidden Venice Walking Tour. With a brown cape swung around her shoulders, speaking of trading with foreign lands, she reminded me of a Venetian from the 1400’s. She showed us the church porch that protected Europe’s first bankers, and the nearby street to house Europe’s first insurance agent, gambling on those treacherous trips across the Mediterranean. We saw some of Europe’s first public clocks, divided into 24 hours, where XXIIII meant sunset.

We took a ferry across to Murano. Glass has been boiled, twisted, and sculpted on this island for over 800 years. We saw some extraordinary work in the Museo del Vetro, exceptional colours and inserts, the light shining through translucent pieces that had been carefully crafted centuries ago. It took us a while, but we finally found a Fornace that was offering demonstrations. As we were sitting down, the man twirled some glowing magma on a stick. With some pliers in his other hand, he pulled and snipped the liquid, encouraging a horse’s head to emerge. Four more strategic tugs created the legs, and then a few more swift movements produced the tail and severed the animal from its creator. The whole process was over in a few seconds. To his right, we noticed a mountain of pale blue horses, discarded from previous demonstrations, perhaps waiting to be melted and reborn the next day. I rescued one of the horses from the showroom, having seen the birth of his cousin.

We finished up with a late lunch – the food a little better than the terrible fare available on the main island, then accidentally caught the Vaporetto going the wrong direction, circumnavigating the picturesque island before finally arriving back at our hotel.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.

The Duomo di Milano cathedral was beautiful, one of the most stunning churches that I have ever seen. The entire structure was carved out of pink marble, and the front façade had just been polished. It took over five hundred years to create this glowing patchwork of pink. The colours varied from block to block, yet they all blended together to create a harmony of warmth.

In the museum at the Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, there is a very interesting Pieta by Michelangelo. Our guide told us that this might have been the one that he was carving for his own tomb, but he died before it was finished. He had originally planned a design of Mary facing to the side, but later decided that the composition worked better if she was facing forward. Here two faces are still visible in this unfinished masterpiece.

We were also lucky enough to spend 15 minutes admiring “The Last Supper”, originally painted by da Vinci. It deteriorated quickly after he finished it in 1498 onwards, and has since had to suffer through being restored, scratched off, restored, un-restored, stoned, removed, reattached, cleaned, stabilised, bombed, restored, stabilised, and then restored again. While what we saw might not have been remotely like what was painted by da Vinci, it was a spectacular painting. The centrepiece of what was once the dining hall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent, the perspective works perfectly. The figures looked down upon us, and the scene was full of movement and mystery.

Image from para communications.

The ship let us off early so that we were able to catch the 8:57 train, getting us to the World Heritage listed Colosseum by 11:00 am. I had pre-purchased tickets on the web, so we were able to smugly walk past the long line of people waiting to buy tickets and get inside reasonably quickly. We had both pre-loaded Rick Steves’ audio guide onto our iPhones, and we listened to it as we walked through this immense structure. I enjoyed this particular commentary of Rick Steves’. Hearing the trumpets blare and his vivid descriptions, I could very easily look down into the centre ring and imagine the horrific theatrics that were played out in the second century CE. The underground passages that served as the backstage were also visible, giving an insight into the mechanics that were required for such a spectacle. To think that right on this spot, wild animals were brutally tortured, or that condemned men were placed in costumes and forced to act in a elaborate plays that would end in their death. This is the place where an estimated million animals and half a million people were put to death for entertainment. Although, having just seen the enormous bull ring in Malaga, I wondered how much has really changed in 1900 years.

I told Adrian that we had no time to stop and eat, so we grabbed a pizza and toasted sandwich to eat while on the metro. Our next stop was a visit to the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta. The order ruled over Jerusalem, then Rhodes, then Malta until it was ejected when Napoleon I captured the country in 1798. After the loss of Malta the Order settled permanently in Rome in 1834. The Magistral Villa is located on the Aventine hill, and hosts the Grand Priory of Rome, the Embassy of the Order to the Holy See and the Embassy of the Order to the Italian Republic. The Order still claims sovereignty, and thus the villa has extraterritorial status. I was able to peek through the keyhole and see St Peter’s basilica through the avenue of trees. That was our next destination.

After returning to Italy, it was time to cross another border into the Vatican City, and experience Adrian’s 100th World Heritage site (my count is around 50). The immense granite obelisk towers over the square. Originally carved by the Egyptians to honour the sky god Ra, then stolen by the Romans to venerate Jupiter, it now stands with a tiny cross at its peak to mark the transition from one superstition to another. There was a 100-foot tree nearby that was a gift from Belgium, and when the Pope received it he declared “May the Church in Belgium, and especially the Diocese of Liège, continue to be a land where the seed of the Kingdom, that Christ came to scatter on earth, generously germinates”.

Thanks to the terrible weather, the line into St Peter’s basilica was relatively short, and we were soon inside the church. Once inside, I was very impressed by the vast and ornate interior. The floor looked like a rich carpet, though it was really a pattern constructed in marble. Every surface was gilded or embellished in some way. We listened to Rick Steves’ audio guide, which irked me a little. I didn’t like hearing about his very statements about “Jesus’ message of love”, that “things are much more enjoyable here if you become a temporary Catholic”, and “your time here can be awe inspiring and beautiful if you accept and respect things on Catholic terms”.

However, he did touch upon the financing with indulgences, pillaging of the Pantheon, and torture during the Inquisition. He spoke of how the church betrayed Michelangelo, by promising they would be faithful to his plans and then altering them soon after his death. I learnt that the reason that the bronze statue of St Peter near the alter is wearing a toga is because it was probably originally of a Roman official, and later on the Catholics just replaced the head and placed some keys in his hand.

Suddenly it was 4pm, time to head back to the ship. We discovered that the metro station that google maps claimed was near the San Pietro train station did not actually exist, and thus decided it was best to catch the metro all the way back to the Roma Termini station and catch the train from there. By the time we finally got onto a train it was not going to arrive at Civitavecchia until 5:57pm, giving us only a half hour window for delays and getting back to the ship. Happily, the train moved towards the coast without delay, and we made it back onto the ship with ten minutes to spare.

Today, we explore Genova before boarding the cruise ship that will be our home for the next nine nights, as it takes us through the Mediterranean.