Our drive to Venice started a little late after a fabulous lunch at Uncle Rosano’s sister’s house (best lasagna I’ve ever had). Due to our lack of GPS, I was navigating in the old school way with a giant map of Italy. We got off to a great start and were making excellent time when all of a sudden traffic on the super fast autostrada came to a complete stop.
We were about 3 hours away from Venice at this point and were hoping to get to the hotel by around 9pm. The traffic picked up again but about 5km down the road – complete stop again! What the heck! So, like all good drivers, we turned to the traffic radio station for the highway. But wait… we’re in Italy… sigh … they were talking so fast in Italian that we could only pick up certain words here or there like “traffica intensivo” … but we kept the station on because they also played music… random. We were stuck (still) and all of a sudden they started speaking ENGLISH! Great success!! Except that they said that there were several accidents. We were stuck in traffic for many many hours. It took us about 2-3 hours to go 30 or 40km. The greatest success at that point was the fact that I found the Mastachone!!!
We thought we had lost it and had really given up all hope of eating it because I couldn’t find it in our teeny teeny car … so it must have been forgotten. But then I thought “hmm… the only place I haven’t checked is under Brad’s seat” and TADA!! There it was. These cookie cake goodies are beyond delicious and the only thing more delicious than Mastachone is Mastachone that you thought you lost!! Back to the journey…
We made the executive decision to get off autostrada which was going nowhere fast and attempt the red lines on the map – the regional routes. It ended up being a great success of old school navigating and we made it to the Marco Polo airport to return the car only 15 minutes late! Now the problem was that it was almost 1am and the water bus (that would have taken us right to our hotel essentially) wasn’t running to the island anymore… so we paired up with some other people and got a taxi to the bus station. We walked across the first bridge at around 1:15am and didn’t find our hotel by San Marco Square until 2am.
We spent 45 minutes walking through “beautiful” Venice in the middle of the night…. It was scary. It smelled like urine. There was lots of graffiti on all the steel doors covering the windows. It was fairly disenchanting. BUT we made it to the hotel and I’m sure Venice by day will be FAR FAR nicer than Venice by middle-of-the-night. This was probably the worst day of the trip so far but the good news is we found the Mastachone and we didn’t get charged late fees for the car!!
Hey Taryn, the reason you like the Mastachone so much is because they make it with the meat of the wine grapes after wine making is finished. By the way, the reason you couldn't find them at first was that Brad was hiding them from you so that he could eat them himself....takes after his father you know, lol. Good thing you are a super detective! The old people in Wpg., non-Italians used to think that the mastachone were cigarette ashtrays due to their shape and size and hard outter texture. Your picture looks like they are softer.....I can just taste them now!
ReplyDeleteLove,
Anonymous Mom