My home away from home

After internet confusion and this being stuck on someone else’s computer, I finally get to post this a week late!

This past weekend, seven of us went to Venice. It was a few long train rides down as we watched as mountains turned into fields. I started to sweat as the temperature and humidity began to rise. Who knew that my body would forget about the hot Kentucky summers and grow accustom to the cool alpine breeze.

We wandered through the maze-like streets to get to our hotel in the San Marco area. After a few wrong turns we made it to Hotel Rio. The architecture in Venice is so intricate. We would turn down a random alley and find a beautiful church out of nowhere. Saturday we went shopping at the Rialto but my favorite part is when we found a small shop down a back alley that had antique jewelry. The shopkeeper was an elderly lady who smiled at me as I played dress up in her jewelry. As I waited for Tomitha to dig through a gigantic basket of beads, I looked on the other side of the store where there were old knickknacks lining the shelves and floor. It felt like I had stepped back in time and was looking at her attic. I started to read the titles of some of the books she had that were old and tattered. I suddenly realize she had four books by Lord Byron sitting there in their red worn book covers. They were in Italian but I could tell she had read them many times. It was funny to think that Bryon followed us even Venice.

Saturday late afternoon we went on a hunt for Harry’s Bar which was a common watering hole for Ernest Hemingway. It also was the place where the peach flavored drink the Belini was invented. The bar was right on the water and if you weren’t looking, you would walk right by it, as we did earlier that day. Everyone was dressed to the nines as we walked in, in our t-shirts and shorts.

As unique as Venice is, I was extremely happy for Sunday to come for us to return “home”. When we stepped off the train in Sion, I let out a sigh of relief to see the mountains. They were extremely comforting for some odd reason. It was crazy to think that I could visit a place as gorgeous as Venice and still prefer the mountains and countryside of Switzerland. Gryon had become our home and had given us the freedom we had been reading of in Wilhelm Tell. In Venice I felt very trapped and tightly confined to one area but up in the Swiss Alps I felt free to open breeze and safe to explore. (On the right is the picture I took in Sion as we got off for the first time in Switzerland after Italy. Even cloudy it looks beautiful!!)

Caitlin