Venice to Burano: July, 2007

All too soon, it was time to head to Burano to meet the others.

What previously sounded like a break from the heat and crowds of Venice now seemed like an inconvenient obligation, but at 1:00 PM we left our lunch restaurant to catch the water bus to Burano.

Gina and Laszlo had stayed a night on Lido Isle before the cruise, and they suggested taking the Grand Canal to Lido and then connecting to Burano.

It took us longer to get to the Grand Canal than we anticipated, and then we had to wait a few minutes for the right water bus.

Looking at a map later, we might have been better off continuing across the island of Venice to take a different water route to Burano, but we enjoyed the beautiful buildings on our way to Lido.

We arrived at Lido around the time we were to be on Burano, and it turned out we missed the connecting boat to Lido by a few minutes, so we had to wait a half hour for the next one.

I went over to the town to find a restroom, and it gave me the chance to enjoy a little of the atmosphere of Lido Isle.

While not in the heart of tourist activity, it seems like a wonderful place to stay while visiting Venice.

With a 24 hour unlimited public transportation pass costing only 15 Euros, that’s much lower than the price differential between Lido and St. Mark’s Square, which is about fifteen minutes away, if you catch the express water bus on time.

Motoring across the open sea toward Burano generates a nice wind flow, and there is some nice if not spectacular scenery, including the island of Murano, famous for glass blowing.

The trip from Lido to Burano took about 45 minutes, and we were sure we would meet fury for showing up over an hour late for our rendezvous.

It turned out the others had been enjoying their day in Lido and also felt like they were breaking away from a place they were enjoying.

Why can’t cell phones work worldwide just like they do in the U.S., without a lot of extra charges?

That’s what we needed: cell phones.

When we found them, we learned that they had also missed the more direct boat to Burano, and so they caught a boat that went over to the other side of the island of Venice before backtracking to Burano.

The funny thing is that if they had either waited for the next boat in Lido or we had gone to the other side of Venice to catch our boat, we might have met up for the boat ride.


As it was, they only beat us there by about fifteen minutes.

Julie, Rollie and Cheryl were starving, so they enjoyed a meal at a little restaurant, and Gina, Jered and Laszlo joined them for drinks.

Jay, Amy and I wandered out in the streets looking for cheaper drinks and browsing the interesting shops which specialized in lace and blown glass.

The others joined us in shopping. Jay and Amy bought fountain pens with glass feather stems as souvenirs.

By this point, our Euros were running very low, so we charged the pens as well as lunch.

Burano is a delightful little island with canals making it feel like a smaller version of Venice.

It doesn’t take all that long to see, but to savor it would require more time than we gave it.

We headed back to Venice less than two hours after we arrived.



Cheryl and Rollie rode water bus buses all the way back to the hotel, but the rest of us decided to walk after we stopped to change buses on the far side of Venice.

The walk through town again surprised me by being charming and uncrowded.

When we reached the Grand Canal, the Julie, Jay, Amy and I caught a boat back to our hotel, but Gina, Laszlo and Jered chose to continue their stroll.