“It hurts quite a bit.”

“Good news.” Mimi rubs my head. “It’s not as bad as Venice.”

UNCLE LEROY HAD SENT a postcard from Venice. On the back, he had written, “Pretty, but the place smells.” Mimi had always wanted to go to Venice, so tracking down a lost relative and a missing bundle had been the perfect excuse.

“We’ll go in the winter, when the prices are better and there aren’t as many tourists.”

“It’ll be cold.”

“Not as cold as Guelph.”

We took the train from Nice to Venice. It wasn’t much of a trip. Nice to Genoa, Genoa to Milan, Milan to Venice. The Rocky Mountaineer Escape Circle from Vancouver through the Canadian Rockies would have been more fun and with better scenery.

I mentioned this to Mimi as a point of reference. “Does the Mountaineer run in the winter?”

“No.”

“Whereas the train to Venice does.”

When we arrived at the Santa Lucia station, the island was shrouded in fog.

“Now what?”

“The vaporetto stop is right over there.” Mimi dragged her bag down the walkway to the Grand Canal. “We want number 1 or 82.”

“Okay.”

“Number 1 makes all the stops on the Grand Canal,” Mimi told me. “Number 82 is an express.”

“Let’s take 82.”

“If we take the express, we might miss something.”

“We can’t see much in the fog.”

“It isn’t that thick.”

Mimi was right. The fog wasn’t that thick, but what there was gave the place a faint, hazy appearance, as though the city didn’t really exist.

Mimi held the guidebook up so I could see the map of Venice.

“It’s not a big place,” she said. “Not sure where they would have put a Wild West show.”

“Maybe the show didn’t come here,” I told her. “Maybe the show was close by, in Padua or Marghera, and Leroy took a day off to see Venice and send a postcard home.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mimi. “We’re here now.”

The number 1 vaporetto wasn’t as large as I had imagined, and it did stop everywhere.

“Tell me this isn’t great.”

“It’s great.”

“Look at that, Bird. Gondolas. You don’t see gondolas in Guelph.”

“We have kayaks and canoes on the Speed.”

“Venice is over fifteen hundred years old. Guelph hasn’t cracked the two-hundred-year mark yet.”

“That means Guelph is in better shape.”

I had my camera out, ready to take a picture of a crazy sculpture, a large, white hand coming out of the water and grabbing one of the buildings, when the vaporetto was hit by a wave from an enormous cruise ship that was lumbering its way out of the lagoon.

SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, and letting Mimi clean my nose is not as pleasant as I had imagined.

“We have to get the crust off.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Hold still.”

“Don’t disturb the scab.”