Cycling in Venice
8 April 2007 | touring, travel | No Comments
I’ve considered documenting my cycling exploits in Italy, but I’ve never really done anything about it. Maybe over the next few entries or possibly over a few years I will document some of the things that I’ve experienced while cycling through that beautiful country.
My first rule of thumb: don’t attempt to cycle in Venice. Just don’t. This is not something Venicians do. They paddle their boats around, and walk up and down bridges, and quite honestly, they stay out of Venice so they can rent their places for a lot of money. I did not cycle in Venice…much.
This was my first destination on my first trip to Italy. I packed my bike in a cardboard box that I wasn’t going to reuse. This is how I entered Venice at 1 o’clock in the morning: 2 pieces of luggage, and one gigantic bicycle box… which brings me to my second rule of thumb: Don’t even bring a bicycle in a box to Venice because hauling it to your hotel is going to be a bitch. Fortunately for me (and my friend Raquel) , our hotel was next to the train station which happens to be the most convenient place in the entire city that you could be staying if you had to bring a bicycle into the city of Venice.
I should mention that I thought about this event for a long while before the trip even began. That is, how the hell do I get the box from the airport to our hotel? I packed a dolly wheel just for this occasion. This wheel, I thought, would be my triumph over the much more prehistoric method of simply dragging the box. Not so. I had never fully thought out how the wheel would be attached to the box, so the first time I hit the ubiquitous Italian
cobblestone the wheel immediately popped off the box. A good segue into rule number three: the Venice train station is inconspicuously filled with good quality luggage carts that are free and do quite well over cobbled streets. Look for these carts!
As it turns out, showing up at 1 am was the right thing to do. The town is absolutely dead and moving through Venice, as anyone knows whose been to Venice, is impossible in the middle of the day. Also, once we were settled into our hotel, we managed to find a good Irish bar that had convenient parallel boat parking adjacent to the bar. Thank god for the Irish or at least their bars.
One more quick rule of thumb, then I’ll try to curb this practice: drinking and finding your way around Venice doesn’t mix for most. For me, it’s just as well. Being completely disoriented somehow makes me feel more with the nature of the world. Like I have no control and that’s simply just the way it is. Venice, makes me feel even more like this than anywhere else I know. Every alley looks vaguely similar to every other alley. There are no peaks and valleys, so one never gets high or low enough to view the entire city. If you’ve ever read the book House of Leaves then you would know what Venice feels like. While walking in Venice I sometimes feel as if I could walk myself into an alley that is somehow completely surrounded by water where the only way out is to jump into the canal and cross. The helplessness is thrilling.
I could go on and on, but I will let you know that at the end of our four days in Venice, when Raquel and I
left for a month long oddesey to reach Rome by bicycle, we both had two functioning bikes. One of which, I rode up and down the alleys of Venice very early in the morning just to say a did.
So let’s review what we have learned, shall we? Venice = no bicycle, unless you’re a badass like me.
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