In the end, of course, Sally’s passport arrived back with a day to spare, and we were able to go on our holiday after all. Rather unusually, you might think, for a holiday in Croatia, ours began in Venice. Nevertheless, owing to the vagaries of late-availability flight deals to non-cheap-flight accessible countries, we arrived there late on Friday night. I’d been to Venice only once before, on a rainy couple of days in August nine years ago, while inter-railing my way around Europe. I remembered it as being a mostly rainy place, full of pigeons and tourists with umbrellas at my eye level (although only the tourists had umbrellas, obviously), but this time it was just full of tourists. We mostly managed to keep away from the crowds, though, and I rather enjoyed wandering off along quiet side streets and over bridges, admiring the beauty of the city and failing to be pursued through the streets by a small red-cloaked dwarf, although I began to appreciate this slightly less when we realised we were in fact hopelessly lost and had to get back to the train station soon in time to catch our train down to Ancona, from where we were catching the overnight ferry across to Split in Croatia.
Luckily we made the train, and even more luckily, we had a cabin reserved on the boat when we arrived there, so we were able to retreat to our own space and try to get some sleep during the 9 hour journey across the Adriatic. Before I could get to sleep, however, I did take note of the sign pinned to the side of the cabin in four languages informing us that the management would not be responsible for any of my values anywhere on the ship, so I resolved to recklessly abandon mine for the rest of the evening.