Well this was an interesting day to say the least. Although we experienced more rain and flooding, we were being held back from exploring Venice by no means. Actually, the rain came and went and it ended up being a fairly decent day for exploring. Sites for Nona included the Dogge’s Palace, a gondola ride – a rainy one no less, the Bridge of Sighs, the Venetian Dungeon, dinner at our favorite restaurant in the world (Trattoria Sempione), gelato in Piazza San Marco and then a wait at the train station for the evening sleeper that would take us to Munich, Germany….yeah, that’s where believe it or not this story gets interesting.

So, we were taking the Austrian/German (multi-country-connected) night train from Venice to Munich. Only problem as the train rolled into the Venetian station and we made our way onto the platform, the German train workers decided to go on strike. Apparently, about 4 hours from Venice the Germans hopped off the train but the Austrians’ stayed on. Well, the Austrian side of the train was clean, but the German side was not. That being a problem in that the trains were connected and supposed to disconnect in Salzburg in the wee hours of the morning. Finally, our one German guy showed up via bus and ‘somewhat’ cleaned our side of the train. Actually, ‘clean’ would be an overstatement. He just more of threw sheets onto the bunks and picked up the dirty coffee cups from the last passengers. All good, we’ve stayed in worse.

Good news was, the train was here and because it was an ‘international’ ride, the 5 day strike only somewhat affected the schedule of our train. How that is going to play out when we go from Munich to Paris in a few days will be interesting, but we’ll just cross that bridge when we get there. It was a long day, but only a short time before we fell asleep, nestles in our bunk beds, with thoughts of gelato and gondolas swimming in her heads. As the train rumbled down the tracks towards Austria and then finally on to Munich, Germany, we dreamed of pretzels, sausage, good beer and the Alps!