July 31st - Venice Day 1

We tried to sleep in a little today because we knew we would be sailing into Venice around 11:00 am.  Roger & I went up and got breakfast and brought it back to the room so that we could watch the John Heald morning show.  What I didn't know was that Roger had sent a letter in and John read it on the tv.  Calvin the assistant cd sang me Happy Birthday.  They later sent me a bottle of champagne, a signed picture of John and Calvin and when we came back from spending the day in Venice there was a plate of chocolate covered strawberries.  At 11:00 am we headed up to deck 5 to watch as the ship came into Venice.  We cruised past Lido beach which is where they came up with the name of the Lido deck.  We sailed past St. Mark square and on to the ship port.  Before getting off the ship we went and ate lunch in the dinning room.  We had decided to head off the ship around 2:30 so we met down on deck 0 and headed off to see Venice.  We met a gondolier named Fabio and we went on an hour ride with him.  I really liked going down the little canals.  He would tell us about some of the buildings but it was really hard to understand what he was saying with his accent but it was a lot of fun.  He dropped us off an hour later and we really had no idea where we were but eventually we found St. Marks Square but it was already 5:30 so the church was closed to visitors.  I think it was probably closed even earlier because we saw a bride and groom along with all their guest come walking out of a different area and head off.  We decided to head back to the ship which only took us around and hour.  We took showers and headed to dinner.  Tonight we had open seating but we ate in our same dinning room and had our regular waiter.  After dinner we went and looked at out pictures and then went up to deck 11 to look at the lights of the city.