Made it to Venice!

Well, to Mestre.  We are staying in a hotel here, the town on the mainland across from Venice.  While it's nice to save a few bucks, the big reason is that bikes are potentially simply not allowed in Venice. Where would you ride them, right?  Rather than risk arriving in town and being told we could go no farther, we decided just to stay in Mestre.  It's nice enough here at Hotel Aurora.

The bikes came out mostly fine.  A couple scratches and a rotated seat, but functionally everything seems fine.  Another nice perk is that they didn't charge us for the bikes.  In my experience the amount charged at the gate is completely random and has no relationship to the amount listed on the website.  We expected $150 per bike, so it's a pretty significant savings!  In fact, between that and ~$100 that we saved by not boxing the bikes, we have a goal - once we start biking we will try to keep our food expenses to less than the $400 that we didn't spend on the bikes.  That's a lot of peanut butter!