“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine

As the sun rose over the Florence skyline, I was just finished packing and ready to head downstairs for an early breakfast. Today was the first of two city transfer for the trip and I was required to get up early in order to eat, load luggage and get on the bus. We had a full day to prepare for as we had a business appointment on the way to Venice that nobody really wanted to miss because this particular appointment caught the attention of most on the trip; today, we were stopping at Ducati.

I’ve never been one to find motorcycles particularly interesting so this appointment wasn’t all the important to me. I remember last year during the Audi tour that although the vehicles may not be my cup of tea but the assembly process and business practices are always interesting…this time, Ducati did not disappoint.

Full disclosure: I had no idea that most of these appointments had such strict photography restrictions otherwise I would’ve taken more pictures in the places I could, even though those places weren’t all that interesting anyway.  Therefore I apologize for the lack of pictures of this appointment.

We started the tour in the Ducati museum while we awaited our tour guides to begin the tour proper. Once we were divided into our three groups, we were off to discover the assembly process of the motorcycles.  Our tour guide led us through the plant where we learned that each bike’s components are all situated in a cabinet so each worker has all the necessary parts to complete each bike right in front of them. The assembly process continued with the workers hand assembling each engine and then finally meeting the engine with the bodies of the bikes.

Morris playing peek-a-boo. I swear, we can’t take her anywhere

One of the most interesting aspects to the Ducati assembly line is that everybody on the line knows how to build each model from start to finish. This cross training is essential so each worker can alternate between various positions on the line and prevents burn out and monotony. According to our guide, the factory produces about 80 bikes each day and eventually bumps up production once the heavy season starts.

Once we left Ducati, we were off to finish our city transfer and before we knew it, we had arrived in mainland Venice. The bus parked next to our vaporetto (water taxi), we gave our luggage to the porter and loaded up the taxi and we were off!

Here we not only see a vaporetto but also the rare and elusive Decker in its natural habitat.

Once we arrived in Venice, we took some time to find our hotel and check in and get settled. After a bit of room swapping and rearranging, we were off to explore the wonderful city of Venice….
…three minutes later we were lost.

Venice is set up rather oddly. The buildings are rather tall and the “roads” are about four people wide so navigating through the twists and turns of the city is really quite disorienting. The bright side of all of this is because Venice does not allow any sort of engine based vehicle, we were able to get lost without the fear of being run over by crazy Italian drivers. Another good thing about getting lost is that you tend to find the most amazing things such as this extremely picturesque setting we saw during our panicked attempt to figure out where the hell we were:

Eventually we got dinner and did find our way back just in time to fall asleep and anxiously await the upcoming day.