Venice

Words and Photography by Rebecca Fougerrousse

I travelled to Venice with my husband (Tom) and four year old son (Louis) as part of a 10 day trip to Europe. We planned our trip around visiting Austria (where my husband grew up) and when we realized how close Venice was, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit there as well. We took the Tauern Railway Tunnel from Bad Gastein where my husband’s uncle lives. We drove our car onto the train trailer and settled down in the train for a quick ride under the mountains of the Eastern Alps, which saved a good amount of time over driving the winding mountain roads. When we arrived on the other side, we had a 3.5 hour car drive to Venice. Since you aren’t able to bring cars onto the island, we parked our car at the Tronchetto parking station and took the vaporetto to the city.

We stayed in a lovely AirBnB near the Rialto Bridge. Fortunately, we had an AMAZING hostess who gave us clear directions on where to park and which vaporetto to take and where to get off. The apartment was complete with a full kitchen, a beautiful balcony for drinking wine on, and a separate bedroom, which is great when you are traveling with a child! We were able to put Louis to sleep and have a few hours alone!

For this particular leg of the trip, seeing our son have such freedom in an urban area was a great experience. We live in a residential area in Dallas and while we are able to walk the sidewalks of our neighborhood, there isn’t a lot of freedom to run and explore. In December, Venice doesn’t have many tourists, so in many parts of the city he could run a little ahead of us, chase a group of pigeons, or explore all the corners of a little campo.

We had a lovely lunch in one of the campi and enjoyed an amazing bottle of house wine, while Louis tried to lure the cats and ran around the square just enjoying this massive amount of freedom.

Of course, the architecture of Venice was just spectacular. We enjoyed the small pedestrian streets and the ornate buildings. As a photographer, I was in awe of the light in the city. Being on the water and the sun being low because it was December, the light had a soft glow and wrapped around the buildings illuminating the blue green water of the canals.

It’s been five months since the trip and if you ask him his favorite part, it was most definitely the pigeon chasing and the chocolate gelato! We do our best to talk a lot about the trip in hopes that he’ll have some memories of it as he gets older.

This was one small part of a larger European trip, so we learned a lot about traveling with a little one. The most important for me was - don’t have an agenda. While we set goals of what we wanted to see, we knew there was a good chance that we wouldn’t fit everything in. Before I had children, missing something I wanted to see would have frustrated me, but now I gladly trade it for a little extra time slowing down and just being present with my child in a new and exciting place.

Since this trip, we’ve been to Colorado as a family and absolutely fallen in love with the mountains there. We hope to return this winter for some snowboarding after discovering how easy it is to get there from our home town, Dallas. We’ve also been planning to travel to Hawaii and hope that everything lines up for that to finally happen this fall. We all love the beach and ocean and I know this would the perfect family trip for us!