Post 20 Venice, Florida

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Venice Dec 29- Jan 11, 2026

We rolled into Venice on Dec 29 and checked into a sweet little guest house in the country.  Kristy, the owner had recently purchased the property and we were her first guests.  It was a lovely place with a pool and a small pond on 7 acres.



We made a trip to downtown Venice- lots of little specialty shops and restaurants with a riverwalk along the waterway between the island and the mainland.  Cindy picked up an ice coffee and we walked the main street.  We checked out a few stores and sat for a while in the city park at the fountain/Splash pad.





There was another cold snap in Florida so we used the time to catch up on some of our shows.  We rarely have TV and internet is either poor or non-existent.


We made the stop in Venice to visit some friends (Lorrie and Patrick) that we met in Moracco last year.  We had a delicious lunch with them on New Year’s Eve afternoon.  We had so much fun with them in Morocco and it was wonderful to connect with them again.  As we were having lunch, they told us they were headed to Mexico at the end of the week and wondered if we might want to stay at their place while they were gone.  Only catch was that we would have to take care of their 2 cats.  Sure, we said.  A place to stay and a pet fix at the same time!  Anne’s not a huge cat fan but she admits these two were the best cats ever.






For NYE, we whipped up a nice charcuterie board.  We celebrated with champagne mixed with some yummy pear nectar we had bought while in Napa.  We Zoomed with our usual NYE companions, Catherine and Nancy to wish each other a happy year.  At midnight we watched the ball drop, caught another movie and didn’t get to bed until 2am! What a life!

We headed to Lorrie and Patrick’s and the kitties on Friday.  We have been talking about upgrading to a real camper van, so we began our search this week.  We found exactly what we were looking for at an RV show at the Daytona Raceway.  We are now the owners of a RED Winnebago Solis Pocket 36A!   We couldn’t take her home until all the financing, paperwork and registration was complete. The “Mother Ship” as Alison dubbed her, was finally ready to go to Venice in about a week. Yippee!! In the meantime, our faithful Dodge Caravan is in storage until we drive her back to MA in February.



During our week in Venice, we also checked out the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.  The Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus wintered in Sarasota from 1927-1959.



On the property is the winter home of John and Mable Ringling, the circus museum and the Florida State Art Museum. Although we didn’t go inside the mansion, we could walk around the beautiful sculpture and flower gardens and look through the windows.  The Banyon trees were stunning!









The Circus Museum was a fun place to wander through.  There were a lot of old circus stuff and the largest scale model of a circus in the world.  It includes 50,000 individual pieces and was made by Howard Tibbals over the course of 50 years. Such detail – even the chairs (all 7000 of them) in the Big Top can fold up. It was pretty amazing!














John and Mable were huge collectors of many types of art.  When they died, they left their whole collection to the state of Florida.  It is currently housed in a large building adjacent to the Ringling grounds and managed by the University of Florida’s art department.

We took the opportunity to spend some time at Nokomis Beach in Venice.  It was a beautiful day when we left home, but as soon as we went over the bridge to the island, the fog was as thick as pea soup.  We just walked the beach and found some shells.  We stopped for a bit to listen to the local drumming group that performs weekly on the beach.






Anne’s cousin, Lisa and her husband, Kevin, also live in Venice during the winters and had just returned from a holiday visit back in Massachusetts.  We connected with them for dinner and an evening just chatting and catching up.  Great seeing them as it’s been a few years.


Lorrie and Patrick returned from Mexico and since we hadn’t really had time with them before they left, we stayed for a couple extra days to hang out.

We picked up the new van, put the Caravan in storage until we head back to Massachusetts for a couple of weeks in February, and headed to Fort Myers for a week.

 

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