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After 13 days of industrial strength tourism we decided we’d earned ourselves a day off, and this was it.

I think when we were planning the holiday we’d thought we might go to Trieste on this day, but somehow the idea of spending four hours in the car wasn’t very appealing once we were on the ground. We also didn’t really fancy anything that either Padua or Treviso had to offer for a half day out, and we certainly weren’t going back into Venice again. So we decided during the day on Thursday that we’d spend Friday not doing very much.

We had a late breakfast and then the kids got down to the serious business of not doing much. In their case, that involves going in the swimming pool. Kas was alternating between mucking about indoors and lazing around outside. I had a bunch of geocaching logs to do after the previous day, including about 6 earthcaches that required reading, research and multiple answers as well as logging and photographs.

We dragged the kids out of the pool for a snack based lunch at around 1pm and forced them to come indoors at about 4pm, when they were starting to turn a bit pink.

It took me pretty much all day to do the caching logs as I couldn’t find the hotel’s wi-fi and my phone signal was pretty poor. I got them done eventually though.

We had a couple of hours snoozing in the room before getting ready to go out. You can’t rush a good day of doing nothing in particular.

For dinner we returned to Mirano again and returned to the restaurant we used on our first night there, the Fabbrica di Pedavena. The food and beer were good again but for some strange reason we had trouble attracting enough attention to order puddings, so eventually we gave up and I queued at the indoor bar to pay, and we left.

The kids still fancied pudding, so we wandered around a while and ended up in a gelateria not far away, where we treated ourselves to some really good ice creams. I think Izzy had a marshmallow-flavoured one, which was basically just sugar. Ami and me both tried a lush looking chocolate fondant flavour. They did also have beer-flavoured ice cream, but none of us was brave (or insane) enough to try it. A pleasant quarter of an hour was then spent sitting on the edge of a public fountain eating ice cream and watching the world go by. There are worse things in life.

Back at the hotel we made quick work of a couple of glasses of Baileys and amaretto before retiring to the room to pack our bags and get some sleep. Tomorrow promised to have us back in the “busy” zone.