Elle Takes Europe 2026 - Day 3: Pigeon Patrol
We woke up completely exhausted this morning. After a rather rough night's sleep in an incredibly warm room, we all crawled out of bed this morning and slowly made our way downstairs for our final breakfast in Venice. We continued to enjoy the massive array of options at breakfast. Elle particularly liked the pancakes with syrup. If she could, she would spend the entire day dipping her finger into syrup and eating it. We left shortly after breakfast and made our way back to Piazza San Marco on the hotel’s boat. Elle loves these boat rides; she gets very excited when we hit any sort of bumps, and watching her hair flap in the wind.
When we arrived at the Piazza San Marco, we let Elle completely lead the way, which meant we spent a lot of our morning chasing after pigeons and seagulls. Elle would run and get within a few feet of the birds and stop, not wanting to get closer, and then laugh uncontrollably if they flew away. For a good ten to fifteen minutes, we followed a pigeon that kept walking as we followed after it. Luckily, Elle isn’t very fast, so the birds were never all that concerned. Venice was quiet on a Sunday morning at 9 AM, which made it easy for us to navigate the small pathways, with Elle leading the charge. Eventually, we stopped at a square, I grabbed a cappuccino at the coffee shop, and we made our way back to the hotel. There, we grabbed a few small sandwiches and let Elle get a long nap in.
Originally, we had planned to go back and find dinner in Venice, but instead, after we all woke up from naps, we decided to let our bodies rest and have dinner on our side of Venice, Giudecca Island. After a quick search, we landed on Trattoria ai Cacciatori. We sat on the canal at 5:30 PM, in blistering heat. Even with massive umbrellas covering us, it was no match for the afternoon sun. Jenn was smart and started with a glass of white wine, while I went with red. We started with the tuna tartare, which was fantastic. For our main course, Jenn had the spaghetti pomodoro, and I had the tagliatelle with duck ragu. Elle devoured half of Jenn’s plate, and you can see by the pictures that a lot of it also ended up on her face. We wrapped up dinner with a few scoops of vanilla gelato before sweating our way back to the hotel and packing for our trip to Dublin early tomorrow morning.
