Venice and the myth of the perfect family trip
There’s a very specific kind of optimism that creeps in when you plan a family trip to a city like Venice. You picture yourselves in a gondola, gliding silently through the narrow canals, with golden light bouncing off of the water. You imagine gelato breaks, photo ops on quaint little bridges, and dinners with laughter and wine. You convince yourself that the magic of the city will soften the edges of the irritations and travel fatigue. You imagine everyone getting along because you’re all discovering a new place, together.
And then, of course, it rains.
We arrived in Venice to heavy rain and flooded alleys. The kind of rain that feels theatrical. Like Venice was actively rejecting our presence. We were wet, cold, and trying not to fall into canals while carrying our backpacks across ancient, slippery stone bridges. Honestly, I had a brief moment of standing in a corner of the Piazza San Marco, where we were staying, where I genuinely thought, “What have I done? We are going to be stuck here”.
We weren’t stuck, of course. The next day, the rain cleared. Venice took out the knife off our chests that it had stabbed us with the night before. The rain had indeed cleared, but was replaced by the heat.
Venice in the summer sun is peculiar. The water sparkles, sure. The colours of the buildings pop. But the streets fill up. Fast. The heat turns every alley into a slow-moving human tunnel of sweaty bodies. People yelling. People bumping into you. Loud tourists. Loud seagulls. And then there’s the smell. That mix of seaweed, exhaust, and fried food that gets stronger with every hour. We tried to sightsee. We really did. We went to the expected spots. We walked. We took photos. We drank overpriced water. At some point, I remember looking around and thinking, “I’m not enjoying this, and I’m trying so hard to enjoy this”.
And then, just as the exhaustion began to settle, we got the news: our return flight had been cancelled. A country-wide transport strike. No planes. No trains. Italy had simply... stopped moving.
It was a double stab. We were indeed stuck.
There’s something especially cruel about finding this out after a long day of sightseeing. The energy reserves were gone. Tempers were fraying. And suddenly, we were scrambling. We scoured the internet for alternatives. Trains were full. Flights were too expensive or not flying at all. Finally, the only viable option: a bus. A 13-hour bus from Venice to Marseille. It would leave at 00:30 the night after our checkout date. Checkout was at 11:00 am. Which meant: a full day in Venice with nowhere to stay, nothing left to see, and a long road ahead.
So we walked. Slowly. Aimlessly. Killing time.
The bus ride was the exact kind of terrible you expect from a bus leaving at half-past midnight. The seat was cramped. The person next to me had absolutely no concept of personal space. He made phone calls on speaker. Watched TikToks at full volume. Fell asleep in weird angles that bled into my seat. I retorted to counting hours. That’s what is particularly numbing about a night bus. You don’t sleep, really. You just wait.
I know people rave about Italian food, but honestly? Most of what we ate was disappointing. Expensive, too. Tourist prices for mediocre pizza. Lukewarm pasta. Bread that wasn’t worth the carb guilt. The only time I genuinely enjoyed a meal was in Murano. It wasn’t even a fancy restaurant. Just a small place where the food was warm, the prosecco was cold, and everything felt quieter. Murano and Burano were the saving grace of the trip. The colours, the feeling of being somewhere that didn’t demand anything of you. No line-ups, no shoulder-to-shoulder movement. Just space to breathe.
I think I went to Venice with an unconscious hope that something meaningful would happen. Just something good. A conversation. Some kind of emotional reward for all the effort it took to get there. But it didn’t really come. And maybe that’s what makes family trips so complicated. We go into them thinking the trip will do something. That it will fix something, soften something, help us bond. But most of the time, it’s just logistics and discomfort and group dynamics playing out in a different city. The city changes, but the people stay the same.
As they say, wherever you go, there you are.
We took a lot of pictures. And in most of them, you’d never know how cranky I felt. That’s the funny thing about travel photos, they’re always a bit dishonest. They don’t show the heat, the stress, the cancelled flights, or the bad food. They don’t show you waiting six hours with your big bags in the outskirts of the city waiting for the wretched bus to arrive, killing time playing Atlas (a game I’m pretty sure my sister and I invented when we were little). But they do capture something. Perhaps a reminder that even if it didn’t feel magical in the moment, you were there. And that’s still something.
Never say never. So I think I’d like to go back to Venice someday. Preferably alone. Or with someone I don’t have to plan around. I’d like to go when the weather isn’t trying to prove a point, when there’s no itinerary, and no myth of what the trip should be. That’s a lot of constraints.