“Last weekend, in Venice to board a ship for an Adriatic cruise, I turned what could have been a boring hotel-to-pier transfer into a cool sightseeing experience: I hired a water taxi to take me and my husband from the Piazza San Marco, where our hotel was, up the entire length of the Grand Canal to the cruise pier. We motored under the Rialto and past countless famous museums, palazzos, and vaporetti. We had a gondolier’s-eye view of Venice. Eventually we wound out of the touristy heart of the city and into neighborhoods where the locals live their everyday lives and that we would never have seen otherwise. And we were dropped off just a few feet from our cruise check-in desk. The cost? 110 euros—a bargain for an unforgettable and quintessentially Venetian experience.” —Consumer News Director Wendy Perrin, currently cruising the Mediterranean