All right.

First of all, it seems weird for me to start a podcast and not mention the Wondery news from today, which is basically that Amazon imploded Wondery and broke up the team into several parts and laid off 110 people.

If you’re one of those people and listen to this podcast and I can be helpful, feel free to reach out.

You know how to find me.

But Lexstreaming.com.

Yeah.

But I’m sorry for those people and I’m sorry for what happened to Wondery because it didn’t have to happen.

That’s as much opinion as I’m going to share on that matter at this moment.

But we’re still recounting that Italy trip.

The content that will never end.

We’re going to cover our trip to Venice because we left Florence and went to Venice.

And maybe we’ll even cover some in Naples.

Who knows?

You will in the next five minutes.

Your Daily Lex.

Hi.

There are theme songs I skip on TV shows and podcasts, but I imagine the vast majority of listeners to this podcast do not skip because there’s no like seven second skip button or however long that theme song is.

So anyway, it’s one of the greatest theme songs ever written, I would imagine.

So why would you bother?

You wouldn’t.

You wouldn’t bother.

Okay, let’s talk about Venice.

We once again had the perk of when we got to Venice, our hotel room was already ready.

But first we had to get to that hotel room.

And I would not say that we are cheap, right?

We did this big Italy trip that wasn’t cheap.

But Lauren hates spending money on things where she thinks you don’t have to spend money on them.

So, you know, the hotel’s recommendation was take a water taxi from the train station to the hotel.

But the thing’s right next to each other.

It’s just that, you know, since Venice is full of canals, you have to cross the canal to get from the train station to the hotel.

And we’re like, it’s not that long a walk, which is true, but you have to cross bridges.

And the bridges that we crossed, the ones that you could cross to get from the train station to where we were going, were about 50 stairs up and 50 stairs down.

So I took two suitcases totaling about 100 pounds and Lauren took the other suitcase and hustled it up and hustled it down.

It was hard.

It’s a good thing I’ve been doing working out because otherwise I couldn’t have done it.

Wow, it was hard.

But we get to the hotel, which was beautiful, however insanely built, where they’re like, oh, we’ll take the bags up to your room for you.

And I’m like, I’m happy to do it.

They’re like, no, no, no, you want us to.

Because you could take the elevator up one flight, but then you had to take stairs up the next flight.

And so they had somebody do it for us.

Very nice.

So we left the hotel and after we had gotten settled in and we didn’t want to stop to eat because we really only had like 18 hours in Venice.

So we’re like, let’s get some street food and keep walking and exploring Venice while we eat.

So we did that.

We bought some more gifts for our kids.

I bought some bracelets for myself.

We got earrings for Lauren.

I got a bell.

We got a purse, whatever.

And eventually we came back to have dinner.

We had insanely delicious pasta.

We shared pizza as an appetizer and Lauren had pasta with smoked salmon in it and she does not like smoked salmon and she loved that pasta dish anyway.

But of course I missed the key thing of this day, which was we had a gondola ride.

You can’t go to Venice and not do a gondola ride.

We did a gondola tour and it starts raining about an hour before our tour and it was really raining.

This is when we were doing some of our shopping and just before the tour is going to begin, the rain stops, which was great.

We got on a gondola with a silent gondolier and two other passengers.

The gondolier said nothing the entire time.

I knew that he spoke English because he did say something to the tour guide who spoke to him in English and he responded in English, but he was silent.

All the other gondoliers in this kind of caravan of gondolas that we were in were talking, but it was fine.

We saw cool stuff.

They weren’t sure because of the rain if we were going to get to go in the Grand Canal, but we did get to go in the Grand Canal.

It was awesome.

The whole thing was great.

Let’s see.

Then we had that dinner and then we were walking off dinner and we stopped for dessert.

I got gelato in a bubble cone and a bubble waffle cone.

It was awesome.

At some point in the day we also had this chocolate-filled cannoli.

The food is some of my favorite memories of Italy.

Eventually we went to sleep and then we woke up way too early and we decided, hey, since we’re awake at six something in the morning, let’s go on a walk.

We walked all over Venice.

We did about 2.75 miles.

It was funny because all my workouts are tracked by Apple Watch and by Strava so you could see the path we took, which was this insane aurora boris of us walking all over the place.

I don’t know if I pronounced that word right, but we’re going to pretend I did.

Then it was our final morning in Venice before we had to take another train ride, which meant I had to lug those same damn two suitcases back over that bridge to get back to the train station.

Then we had the worst train ever.

I will tell that train story now and then we’ll do the Naples stuff tomorrow.

Then we’ll be nearly done with Italy.

Every other train we had taken had been a high-speed train, but for whatever reason we couldn’t get a high-speed train from Venice to Naples, the longest distance.

We could get a regular crappy commuter train from Venice to Bologna and then a high-speed train from Bologna to Naples.

Wow.

The commuter train sucked.

It was not equipped for…

First of all, it was packed to the gills and had no room for suitcases.

There weren’t any places to put suitcases.

The only place you could put suitcases was marked as for bikes and people would put suitcases there and then the train conductor would come through and say, no, this is where bikes go and then bikes would come and yeah, it was bad.

You’re sitting with suitcases.

You have suitcases in your lap.

You have suitcases blocking seats.

You have suitcases blocking humanity.

It was horrible.

Everybody on that train was grumpy.

Then I was talking to two folks who both spoke great English but who were both Italian.

First, they were going to be annoyed with me, but then they took pity on me when they realized, A, that I was American and B, that I really didn’t have any other option because I just had this suitcase with me and the seat was not big enough for me and the suitcase, so I was taking up some seat space and whatever, but they were very nice and they were curious to learn about the U.S.

and they told us about Italy and then one of them was also going to Naples, so that was exciting.

We had to make the same train connection.

Then our time in Naples began, so we are nearing the end of Italy, so if you haven’t liked this stuff, don’t worry.

Tomorrow’s probably the last day of Italy.

Maybe I’ll do one day dedicated to the cruise and then I’m done.

Then I have to find new things to talk about.

I don’t know, the weather?

Lex.