Today’s excursion was “Venice On Your Own”:

A Scenic Transfer to Venice’s Renowned Piazza – From your berth in Chioggia, set off on a leisurely panoramic cruise, passing magnificent waterside palazzos and piazzas and peering down the lapping, narrow canals that weave their way into this UNESCO World Heritage Site’s medieval corridors. Disembark at the landing pontoon next to Palazzo Cornoldi, then begin your exploration of Venice. You may decide to take a short walk to beautiful St. Mark’s Square, crossing the four elegant bridges that link the waterfront. Enjoy free time to visit the splendid Gothic-Byzantine St. Mark’s Basilica and its grand Campanile bell tower and admire the Doge’s Palace, Piazza San Marco and other nearby attractions. At the end of your stay in Venice, you will return to Palazzo Cornoldi and begin the transfer back to your ship.

As can be seen from the image at the top of the page, the ship didn’t dock at Venice. That hasn’t been allowed for a while. Instead, the ship docked at Chioggia. However, it didn’t do that until around 1pm due to tides. In the morning, we went to the Star Theatre to watch a do-over of the previous night’s ABBA show, which had been cancelled due to technical problems.

Initially, we were a bit apprehensive about doing the “Venice On Your Own” excursion because it was listed as lasting 7 hours! We weren’t worried about the ship going anywhere - this was the last port of call - but we did need to get packed for our disembarkation the following morning.

Then we remembered how long the boat would take to get from Chioggia to Venice, so that would - ultimately - knock off around 3½ hours off the time, leaving us with about 3½ to freely roam around. Timing still wasn’t quite on our side since we hadn’t given ourselves any time to get lunch on the ship, and we would need to get something to eat in Venice before coming back to the ship.

Once we disembarked in Venice, we wandered through the streets to get to the Hard Rock Cafe shop so that we could buy the Venice City Shot Glass (my wife collects the various city glasses) and then stopped at a restaurant nearby to have some pizza to refill us a bit.

Looking at the various places we might want to see, I discovered Squero di San Trovaso, an unassuming location which is a traditional Venetian boatyard where gondalas and other types of boats are built and repaired. As we weren’t part of a larger group, it wasn’t possible to do an actual tour, but we did manage to get some photos:

Afterwards, we made our way back across the Grand Canal:

and then we went back to the previous restaurant and had some gelato before catching the return trip to the ship.

A lot of the excursions returned quite late, so the ship had kept the World Cafe open, so I snagged some pizza slices and coffee to sustain while the suitcases got packed and put outside our stateroom to be collected in preparation for our departure in the morning.