Day 86 (Venice, Italy) – Cutting it close

I woke up really early this morning so I could head over to St. Mark’s Square to take some pictures without the thousands of tourists and pigeons.  It turned out to be a great idea because it truly is a remarkable sight and it gets tarnished a little during the day by the massive crowds.  The sunset by the water was really quite a sight as well.  I spent a few hours taking loads of pictures of the square, the parked gondolas, and the coastline.

I walked over to one of the larger canals to take a picture of a bridge over it.  There were some steps on the side that led down into the water so I started to walk down them to get a better shot.  The last two steps were covered in seaweed so I knew they would be slippery.  Of course rather than just staying on the steps above them I tried to carefully setup my tripod and camera on the steps covered in very slippery seaweed.  As soon as I took my first step onto the bottom step I completely slid off of it and began to fall into the canal.  I quickly raised my camera and tripod over my head and tried to regain my footing.  But I couldn’t get any kind of grip on the seaweed and kept slipping.  I swear I must have looked like one of those cartoons where the characters feet are flailing all over the place. 

Finally I just decided to just let my feet go and try to fall backwards onto the dry steps.  Luckily I had just enough momentum backwards that I was able to basically sit down on the steps and save myself and my camera from falling into the water.  Phew.  I don’t know what I would have done if my camera would have fallen into the canal.  I guess today was my lucky day but I wasn’t about to see how lucky it was so I packed up my gear and headed back to the room to take a nap.