Ven"ice cold"

6fartsinacart
Jan 13, 2017
2 min read

Tuesday, 10 January 2017: We wake up to the ground being covered in sleet. Without too much further ado, we set off again. After a long day's riding in some snow and sleet, we arrive at our camper stop in Pesaro to dump and refill. We decide to look for a better place to sleep. We end up at a parking bay on the coast road about 20m from the sea. It is so cold we feel sure that nobody would even dream of leaving their comfort to come and chase us.

Wednesday, 11 January 2017: After a blissful sleep, the road leads to Mesola, 80km from Venice. The day is earmarked with wet, cold, sleet and landscape covered in snow. In Mesola we are blessed with WiFi exactly on the day we need to communicate with the "outside world".

Thursday, 12 January 2017: In the morning, Emile thinks to be the apostle Peter and decides to walk on the water. It turns out that the stream next to the camper is solidly frozen. Unable to dump due to plumbing work being done, we head out for Venice very early in anticipation of the time we want to spend walking there. We decide to drive to the camper stop in Venice itself, rather than parking outside Venice and taking a ferry to the centre. We stop there approximately an hour later. Once there, we start dressing like Eskimos using our South African clothes. Needless to say we don't even have close to the right gear, and the journey proceeds on an icy cold note. From the camper stop to the centre of Venice, is a brisk 1,2km walk. We then walk through the network of water 'roads', narrow alleys, bridges crossing canals and all the normal touristy things. After 3 and a half hours of walking, the cold really grips us and we have a unanimous vote to return to Merzy. After 5 hours in Venice and a hefty parking fee, we drive approximately 1 hour to our stop in Treviso. Re-collecting our thoughts on the day in Venice, we can see the Lord's hand in how the paths were straightened and made uncomplicated.

Friday, 13 January 2017: Friday the 13th we are exceedingly blessed. We leave the camper stop at 9am wanting to cover approximately 300km over the Alps. This in itself is no mean feat in winter. Without the Lord's divine intervention, we definitely would not have been able to make it. At some stage the motorway ends and continues in a smaller road at an altitude of 1500m above sea level. We have a blizzard from the front. Fortunately as we start descending, the blizzard starts to lift. We cross into Austria and decide to push past Innsbruck to a small town, Seefeld in Tirol. We arrive in the dark and can't find the stop as advertised in our book (maybe due to the snow) and end up opting to sleep in a parking bay. We have to be out by 8am tomorrow morning.