Wedding Anniversary, A certain escape, God's protection, what a day 10-11-12

Like everyone who's a friend on my facebook profile would know, Saturday the 10th of November was my 22nd wedding anniversary. I decided to dosomething special and take my dear wife away for the weekend and first looked into paris, but eventually decided for Venice. A quick research later afterthe fact showed me that of the top 10 romatic places in the world; Venice comes first. So, I thought mmm goed idea. Booked the flight and sorted out the accomodation. We left on the 9th (friday) and had a language related experience on arrival. Unfortunately, not many Italians automatically speak English! We arrived with the water bus at the stop, and did'nt know how to get to the hotel. We then called the hotel, and the receptionist couldn't speak English, but could only say that it was 5 minutes away. We tried walking, asked another Hotel . Duh... we feigned ignorance once he realised we wanted directions to another hotel. So we went back to the water bus stop and it was dark already, and Catherine (my wife) said we could ask people goint to take a boat if they spoke English. Then, we got our 'angel'. A lovely laday who started describing and then said, it was better to take us there! She walked with us some distance and them gave further directions to the 'Campo S. Stefano' where we were headed. Bless her. We found it. Nice hotel though small room but hey, it was comfy for 2 loverbirds :-) Had a nice time looking around on that evening as the forcast for the next day, our anniversary was for rain and lots of rain. Then catherine again said 'why don't we ask God to give us a dry weather. AND God did! Saturday was not broght and sunny, but dry and we went everywhere we wanted. all within walking distance, the famous San Marco square , my, thousands of people, Italians and tourists like us. A concert was about to start and after walking around and taking photos for a while, never started as speeches and introductions kept going on. So we left. Chilled out for sometime, had dinner and went off to the Rialto bridge. Booked our

boat ticket for the next day. Departure on Sunday (11th) Our flight was for 6:35 AM :-( We had to take the earliest boat at 4.40AM 8 (Ouch!) which could only get us to the airport for 6:07. Tight! I Online checked us in on the Saturday. In any case, we work up for 4.00 and left the hotel at 4.20. Got to the Boat stop to find a deserted area. The boat actually arrived for 4.40am prompt. I knew about how tight the time schedule was and prayed that the boat will make it there in good time and even earlier. It DID! quite a few of the stops had no waiting passangers. We got to the airport at 5:50! So we could go through immigrations and eventually left at 6.45 ish. Missing the flight was a thought that played on my mind, but then I thought we'll simply take the next plane. What did I read in the papers today Floods cause chaos in Venice after heavy rain, Rising sea waters flood 70% of Venice -, Venice 70% flooded after bad weather strikes northern Italy, set to hit... WHAT an escape! God is good. This blog would probably have been written from Venice from a stuck tourist ...