A long overdue update

Let me pick up the threads.

I've not been posting here, purely because I use the 100 Venice Bridges Challenge Facebook page as a means of keeping everyone updated while the Challenge was under way. It was just easier, quicker and less painful while I was on the road in Europe. So this blog stood still. Sorry.

Suffice it to say the Challenge day was a highlight of my life. Really. I took myself out of my comfortable, cushy home in Johannesburg and gave myself a little to-do I wasn't quite sure I'd be able to complete. I'm no spring chicken anymore, and a gym hasn't seen me for, what, the past seven or eight years. Everywhere I went and uttered 'one hundred bridges in a day' I saw raised eyebrows.

Make no mistake, I had more than a few blisters at the end of the day, my face was a shade of pink as a result of sunshine overdosing and my camera shoulder was aching like mad. But I'd climbed two and a half thousand steps without incident, hadn't fallen into a canal, and didn't get smacked by any locals I bumped into because I was too busy looking at bridges to see where I'm going.

We started at seven in the morning in the Giardini, fresh off the vaporetto from Murano where we were staying, and ended fourteen hours later at Ponte Gheto Novo. Inbetween lay ninety eight small, large, flat, steep, iron, stone, and wooden bridges of all shapes and sizes.

It would be a world record, if there were a category for it. Hundred bridges crossed in a day.

So that's history, and all I have now are lots of photos, and a head full of information. Lots of information. Here, at the Venice Bridges blog, is where I'm going to lay it out, everything I've seen and learnt from the crest of a bridge in Venice.

First thing off the conveyer belt will be the bridges e-book which should be available on i-Books if the Apple gods approve. There are stories galore to tell. There are posters by the dozens to make. There's a guide book or two in the making. There are cups with pretty pic... no, scrap that. Enough people are producing cups, aprons and calendars with pretty pictures of Venice. My photos are the real Venice, with the crowds, the grafitti, the stuff drifting in the canal. It's Venice from the top of a bridge at eleven in the morning, not before dawn with the pretty sunrise and no-one around.

So stay in touch, bookmark, follow, etcetera.