What I did on my holidays

For our first family holiday*, Terry, Babs and I went to Venice.

Magical, it was. Crazy, it is. We arrived about 8pm, a bit too late for the baby and therefore a little too stressful for me, but when we (Terry) stopped procrastinating and (I) asked someone for help, we found the boat-bus to the hotel, and took a little journey down the Grand Canal in the evening, with crazy Venice prettily lit and looking just - just- like Venice in Vegas.

Yes, Venice - the real Venice, steeped in history and culture, evocative of masquerade and Renaissance and corsets and Casanova - reminded me of Vegas. And of the 2005 Sienna Miller movie. I'm trash.

Anyhoo, it was beautiful:


There were many and varied yummy delights:


And after a couple of days, the sun shone:

Five days was just about enough with an 8-month old, which is just a little too old to happily be constrained all the time. Babs held up very well, sleeping in the buggy in the mornings and kick-kick-kicking in the BabyBjorn in the afternoons. (I think this was the end of the window for holidays of this kind 'til she's walking properly). The Italians were very sweet and friendly and enchanted by the baby (alright, all babies), with lots of waving and 'Ciao, ciao!' to the baby and 'Complimenti' to us. The food was pretty yummy - Terry went back for seconds on some rigatone with smokey salmon, porcini and courgette; I chowed through several good pizzas, some yummy calamari and a rubbish spaghetti alla vongole. And we only got ripped off once, for some hot chocolate and a coffee overlooking the Grand Canal at the Rialto bridge, when we needed to sit in the sun to get some food into the baby.

The hotel - just the 'most popular' on lastminute.com where we booked - was super-central, super-easy to find off the boat, and the breakfast girls were super-helpful given the grim hours of their job and the grumpiness of some of our fellow guests. We were upgraded to a junior suite, so Babs had her own room, which made things a little easier. The only downer was the lack of hotel restaurant (off season), so we subsisted on king-size bed picnics in the evenings and had to cope with the super-repetitive CNN (I thought the BBC world news channel was bad...) or Italian X-Factor.

Anyway, Venice gets my thumbs up. Next time we go away I will be taking a portable DVD player (we deliberated about taking the laptop, then decided we had enough stuff) and more baby food if we have a baby this small (trying to ensure Babs could eat out was a bit too hard). And get a baby who'll breastfeed on the plane.

*not my first holiday with the baby, which was to my mum's. The first day of which we found out my dad had died. This holiday passed without mishap.