Venice - day 1

It has been a long day - I woke up at 4am to get to Gatwick in time for my 7am flight to Venice. Thankfully my eye was much improved this morning, and I am still using the drops every 2 hours but at least it is not as painful as it was yesterday. I met up with our tour leader and the rest of the group at Gatwick, and we had a very easy and pleasant check in and flight to Venice courtesy of Easyjet - the plane left on time and arrived early (unlike BA!)

Arriving at our hotel by water taxi I was enchanted to see Venice once again - I think I was last here about 11 years ago. It was beautifully foggy and mysterious, and so quiet - what a change from the busy summer months. We dropped our bags off and got straight to work, taking some long exposure images like the one in my first extra. We had a break for lunch, which was very good, and then spent the rest of the afternoon wandering along the main canals taking photos. We spread out over a large area so we were not all taking the same photos and we could be individualistic in our compositions, which was great. As the light faded we got some magical blue hour shots - I liked this one with the long exposure effect on the movement of the gondola bobbing in the waves, I thought that it has a ghostly look to it. I have added an extra of the night time colours at the blue hour.

It got very cold, much colder than London, and so at about 6.30pm we headed back to our hotel, freshened up and went for supper to a nearby restaurant. The supper was excellent - I had a delicious grilled calamari which was tender and very tasty.

Tomorrow morning it is an early start, we are meeting at 6.20am to get the pre-dawn light. I felt much better today, still not quite right,  but after being out in the cold all day I hope I don't wake up feeling ill again tomorrow. I must try to get to sleep now after our long day.

The wifi is hopeless here so I have uploaded this using a hotspot from my phone. There has been no time to carefully look at all my photos from today so I have quickly chosen these few. I will edit the rest when I get back home.