Venice is not ideal for picnics or Parkinson's

The Wife of Bath

Jul 30

When I booked our trip to Italy, I had a choice to fly out of either Milan or Venice for the same amount of frequent flyer miles. As a smaller and car-free city, Venice seemed like the best option for Joe, who has Parkinson's Disease.

We had visited Venice one other time, and that was only for a day. I can remember wishing we had time to just look around, with no agenda to visit sights. So that was the plan; take a train from Padua, get to Venice early, have a relaxing day in an astonishingly gorgeous town, take a bus to an airport hotel, and fly out at sunrise the next morning.

We packed so light that we didn't need drop our bags---our backpacks were also our daypacks. Here's HOB wearing his luggage getting onto one of Italy's many enviable trains.

As planned, we wandered about gaping, from one beautiful scene to the next.

Though I am normally one to follow along with notes, reading about various buildings, I didn't want to do it this day.

HOB and stopped when we felt like it, taking in details, describing all the types of Venetian windows.

A couple of hours into our visit, it was clear I had made a mistake in planning.

Venice, as it turns out, is not a destination for someone with Parkinson's Disease. Those canals? To get over them, you climb a little bridge. Bridge after bridge after bridge after bridge.

HOB is quite fit and he can climb bridges, better than me most of the time. But he gets tired, often suddenly, and needs to rest (ideally to sleep). While we had centrally located hotels during the rest of our trip, our Venice hotel was way out by the airport. My plan had been for him to nap next to me on public benches or in a quiet little park. But we couldn't find any benches or parks.

We also couldn't find a place to picnic, which is banned in most of Venice. (This makes sense because of the massive amount of tourists in the more famous areas).

Miraculously, we managed to locate a bench in a square with no ban on picnicking. I bought two cheap salads from a nearby grocery store. After we ate them HOB was finally able to rest.

To get off the island, we went up and down countless more bridges, getting lost on tiny streets along with the bajillion other day trippers. By the time we got to our airport hotel, HOB's crabbiness, on a scale of 1 - 10, was about 37.

I can be exceptionally unrelenting (go ahead, act surprised). If I want something, I attack, going in from all angles. Try, fail, try harder, keep going, regroup, pivot, try again. It can be hard for me to admit when something isn't working (like when I stayed at my old job thinking if I just worked harder and longer, it would stop being so awful). When HOB collapsed in the crappy airport hotel bed, I finally admitted defeat. HOB has Parkinson's Disease, there's no cure and he finds it frustrating and scary. Traveling in northern Italy is about as easy as it gets and, though he enjoyed looking at art and architecture, it was still too exhausting for him. No amount of planning is going to to change that. Sure, I can still travel, but will I ever travel with HOB again? If I make it back to Venice one day, he's the one I want next to me on a bench in a beautiful square full of Venetian Gothic windows, sharing a picnic.