Some transportation challenges today as we tried to make our way to the Ducati Factory & Museum and then onto Venice. We were booked in for the 11am tour and intended to look through the Museum beforehand.
The trip started well with a quick easy train to Bologna, but then we needed to find the right bus terminal and somewhere to buy tickets - it sounds easy, and you would think that the two went hand in hand but it wasn't obvious - and made all the harder by no cellphone connectivity in the area so no Internet access to check anything, but we got it sorted eventually. Pleased we'd accomplished that we sat back and waited for the bus to arrive - but it never did. We eventually worked out it was a Sat only schedule (Italian bus schedules suck!) so we had to revert to Plan B - a train and a 20min walk instead.
Fortunately we were able to do the Museum after the scheduled tour, instead of the other way around so the delayed arrival didn't affect our morning too much. The tour was interesting - particularly in that most of the asembly is still done by people rather than automated, and each person does a large amount of the process - minimising the number of people that work on each bike which helps with quality control. At peak flow they assemble 350 motorbikes a day. No parts are fabricated on site but all the assembly including the motor is done there.
After the tour we checked out the museum - some very cool bikes, but mainly focused on the racing models that achieved titles in motogp and superbike championships, and only a few old bikes. Not quite as impressive as the Motoguzzi collection we saw at the start of our trip.

We then made our way back to Bologna station, in order to catch a train to Venice. We were later than expected and the train we had planned to catch had already left so we needed to find the next one. It didn't look too difficult - trains departed regularly, though we knew some of the trips took different amounts of time (high speed vs regional). The only departure display we could find with a destination of Venice had a train departing shortly from platform 16, so we traipsed off underground to platform 16 to find it. The train arrived and we double checked with the conductor who confirmed our suspicions - it was a highspeed train and no our tickets weren't valid. She sent us off "up three floors". We wandered around looking for information on that floor, but it was hidden fairly well. We were offered assistance by two people, the first "an illegal street seller" or so we were told afterwards - by an employee of the train station who warned him off and showed us to the regional train area. That was probably a bit of a close call.

On the train at one stage a beggar came through the carriages with printed leaflets asking for money in English and Italian - not something we'd encountered before. We arrived in Venice late afternoon and crammed onto a ferry to get to our accommodation on the centre island not too far from San Marco Square - too many people on the ferry to see anything at all. But we were most impressed with our first real view of the Venice streets and canals when we got off. We managed to navigate our way through the alleys to find our accomodation - passing an Irish pub that we earmarked that for a quick drink later, extra pleased to note they had Magners cider - there is very little cider available in Italy.
We are right in the heart of Venice with gorgeous little shops in all the nearby alleyways - some really different items to what we'd seen in other tourist areas.
We unpacked and went out for a drink at the Irish pub. On the way back we taught Scott how to haggle with the street vendors - he was offered two toys for 5 euro's, and he managed to convince the guy to sell him 3 for that price instead. Venice is reknown for its hand blown glass and we've seen some beautiful glass in the shop windows - looking forward to tomorrow when we head to the islands to see the place where much of it is made.

Sarah: I like the canals. The glass animals we've seen in the windows are very pretty.
April: The motorbike factory was pretty cool. They can produce 350 bikes a day in the peak season. It was pretty cool to see them assemble a bike.
Venice looks amazing. Cant wait to check it out.
Scott: There was an electric robot at the factory that drove around by itself. It followed a special line on the floor.