Today was a long day and everyone is worn out. My watch is showing ten miles of walking. I can assure you, at least 25% of that involved stairs.

We started the day with a complementary hotel breakfast. The highlight for me was real scrambled eggs. When was the last time you had eggs out of a buffet that were actual eggs? The fresh fruits and meats and cheeses were great too. But eggs on a buffet? A nice treat. The Hotel Carlton on the Grand Canal does it right.

A 30 minute walk took 40 minutes to get to the area of Saint Mark’s Square due to the complexities of walking in Venice. Narrow streets and imprecise GPS are not always a great combination. But the plus side is that you get a great sense of what this city looked like 600 years ago. Minus some of the electrical lines and signs.

First up today was a private boat tour to Murano and Burano. Both are archipelagos within the Venetian lagoon with their own histories.

Murano is famous for their glass artistry and have been operating glass blowing furnaces for roughly 900 years. All of secrets of the trade are protected within the families and while there is a sense of community it is fiercely competitive and no one shares techniques. The glass is only produced there, and only glass produced there can truly be called Murano glass. After walking through the process of one of the families we went into the store where the pieces are available to buy. Since a drinking glass is $90, you can be sure that decorative bowl liked was actually $2400, and therefore stayed on the shelf. Beautiful, but not something that really fits in my home. Even knowing that new authentic pieces cannot legally be sold online and are only available in Murano, I was okay not spending the money.

Burano is know for its handmade lace, but more so for its multicolored houses. They are rumored to have been initially painted so many colors due to the local fisherman coming home exhausted and/or drink and sleeping in the wrong bed with the wrong woman. That could be legend, but it could be true. We had time to walk the island and experience it’s culture. The lace was beautiful, their special biscuits amazing, and their faith in community reassuring. Many houses only use curtains as front doors. There is no crime.

A fast water taxi ride back to Venice gave us enough time to tour Doge Palace. The Doge were the rulers of Venice during its peak, when it was it own country. Seeing the upstairs chambers where business was conducted created a stark juxtaposition with the prisons on the lower levels. With power comes the ability to punish, in fact they are famous for it.

Nothing works up an appetite like touring an ancient jail. So we grabbed some food and headed back to the hotel to rest. It had already been a lot of walking and the temperature was dropping rapidly.

We decided to cancel our reservation back near St Mark square and picked a non tourist spot near our hotel, Osteria Vecio Pozzo. The food was cheap and rivaled anything we’ve had to date. And best of all we were done quite quickly, which gave us a chance to get to bed a bit early.

More to do tomorrow, our last day. It’s already starting to sink in and we are silently ignoring it…