The Boats of Venice

Venice has boats instead of cars, so I decided to write a post about it. I got to ride on a ton of boats in Venice.

The water taxi is the most expensive, the fastest, and the coolest boat in Venice (but the other boats were awesome too). As we zoomed out of the airport on the water taxi (aka speed boat) to the dock in front of our hotel, I looked out of the window and felt the wind in my hair. We saw one gulp of shags (aka cormorants) and three cotillions of terns (cotillions is not a number, but instead it means a group of terns).

I took the water bus on a zig zag path across the grand canal. The water bus is like a bus, but in the form of a boat! We also took the water bus all of the way out to Murano (learn more about Murano in my post about it coming soon).

Gondolas may be the most well known boat in all of Venice, but they are also the most easily confused with the traghetto, which is a larger canal transport boat. A gondola can have an ornament on the front, it can be a hawk, an angel, a flag, a vase of flowers, or countless other things (it is usually an angel though, just like the one on the gondola that we rode). I recommend taking the gondola early in the morning so that it is not crowded… but not too early or it won’t be open! A traghetto is an elongated gondola with two drivers! Traghettos only cross the grand canal. You can use them instead of bridges.