Our home swap to Venice, Italy started off with a great perk from our home swap website, LoveHomeSwap.com. By paying for their 2nd tier "gold" membership, we qualified for airport lounge passes at participating airports, which included Toronto Pearson Airport and Venice Marco Polo Airport. We chose the "Plaza Premium" lounge and showed up ravenous, with the expectation (more hope!) of being fed, since we had learned that our Icelandic Air international flights did not include a meal. We were happy to find a fairly decent spread including various types of salads, mixed fruit, soups, sandwiches, and a main course of meatballs in gravy with rice, grilled zucchini, peas and carrots. There was also a variety of desserts, cream puffs and cookies for dessert. Suffice it to say that we were stuffed by the time we left the lounge. But since we had a long travel itinerary ahead of us including 3 flights (2 of which did not serve food), we took along some extra sandwiches and a few cookies to eat later. I had packed a few zip-lock bags just for this purpose.
It seemed like a great idea when we planned our trip to Venice with a layover in Iceland on the way home. We would take Icelandic Air Toronto to Paris with a stopover in Reykjavik and then from Paris we would take an Air France plane to Venice, all for $900 return per ticket. Repeating this journey on the way back, we would take a free 4 day layover in Iceland.
Little did we know that the Icelandic Air plane have would be the most uncomfortable seats that we have ever sat in. They were extremely narrow even for me, had zero remaining leg room after putting our personal bags underneath, and no padding on the seat backs, making for a rough night on our red-eye flight. I made the additional mistake of picking side-by-side aisle seats for Rich and I, since we could not agree on who would sit in the middle seat if we sat together. This meant I had a stranger next to me in the middle seat–one who I could not lean my head on to sleep, as I would have done with my husband, but who squirmed and shifted all night and encroached into my space! I think I gently (and then not so gently) nudged him back to his side several times during our trip.
For our first stopover in Reykjavik, we had to get off of our plane on the tarmac, take a bus to the terminal where our passports were checked, and then back on the tarmac to board a second plane to take us the rest of the way to Paris. In addition to being fairly cold while on the tarmac, we had to lug our luggage up and down stairs multiple times to complete this interchange. Although it was quite early in the morning and a drizzly day when we got off the plane in Reykjavik, the chill in the air made me second-guess for the 10th time whether or not I had packed enough warm clothes for this leg of the trip. It was extremely difficult to decide what to bring (especially when trying to travel with only carry-on, a life-time promise to myself ever since Air Canada permanently lost our luggage), since there would be a significant temperature difference between Venice and Iceland, even though we would be visiting Iceland 2 weeks after Venice.
Finally arriving in Paris 12 hours after leaving Toronto, we had 2.5 hours to change terminals at Charles De Gaulle airport, go through security and make our Air France flight. Since our Icelandic plane landed on schedule, we made it in plenty of time, despite having to take a mono-rail and then walk a significant way through the airport to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2F. Luckily we did not have to take second monorail which we might have had to do if we were in Terminals 2A-2E. It is a bit worrisome for our flights home though since we will need to reverse this route and only have 2 hours to do so. While in the Paris airport, we were reminded of the recent terrorist attacks by the presence of heavily armed guards patrolling the passageways.
Flying Air France from Paris to Venice for the last leg of our journey was so much more pleasant than the two Icelandic Air flights. We had wider seats, more leg room, and despite the flight lasting less than two hours, we received a little snack of tasty cupcakes to go with our beverage. Getting the free lay-over in Iceland by flying Icelandic Air en route to another location is a great benefit, but after this trip, I have already decided that I would not want to do this again. The overall time for the 3 flights was too long and uncomfortable, and trying to catch the next flight was too stressful to be worth it.
We were lucky to be able to actually get our carry-on luggage onto each of our three flights, since we were pushing the boundaries both on size and weight limits of the airlines. For each flight, we tried to line up to board as soon as possible so that there would still be room in the overhead compartments. The Air France flight was the strictest as they both weighed our luggage (including the personal bag that goes under the seat) and made us fit it into the metal rack that measured the size of the carry-on bag. I held my breath as I inserted my suitcase into the rack, and breathed a sigh of relief when it just fit. When we went to weigh our bags, I was under the limit but Rich was just over. Realizing that we were traveling together and would hold up the line by trying to rebalance the weight between our two bags, the airport attendant decided to let Rich through anyways. Phew! We will need to pack better on the return trip so that we both come under the limit.
Once we finally landed in Venice, a full 20 hours from when we departed left our condo in Toronto, we needed to take the Venice Airport shuttle called the Alilaguna in order to reach our home swap location. This boat is a 15 minute walk from the airport terminal and leaves every 30 minutes. A one way ticket is 15 Euros while a return ticket is 27 Euros, but you can save money and pay only 25 Euros return if you buy online ahead of time, which is what we did.
It seemed very appropriate to take a boat into Venice, and our home swap just happened to be located right beside the very first Alilaguana stop from the airport. So a comfortable 30 minutes ride later, we stepped off the boat, walked down the ramp, turned the corner and finally arrived at our destination.
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