To and From the Grandeur

Leaving Venice was not an easy affair. I felt attached to the city though we had only spent a short three days there. It was a magic unexplainable (though quite different from Disney magic, haha). Our departures from our hotel in Venice (to the cruise ship) and from the city of love where we alighted from our cruise ship after our final stop that was back to Venice (to Milan) were via a speed boat and a People Mover respectively. Simply put, this post is about how we started and ended our cruise journey.

Just some background on this cruise we were on before I continue with the pictures…
We were on an eleven day cruise to the Mediterranean via Royal Caribbean International’s Grandeur of the Seas. Our first and last stops were in Venice. On our final day of the cruise, we headed back to Milan for some shopping via the Trenitalia.

So this was how we started our cruise journey…on a speed boat…

Here's our butler helping us with our luggages. As you can see, we boarded our speed boat from the back of the hotel.

Our skipper looking all pro and excited!

Us taking a shot with the boat's interior. All smiles but all sad to leave.

I had to have one picture of the comfy ivory seats and well, myself. Couldn't help it.

We got outside after a while to take a breath of fresh air, enjoy the breeze and experience the scenery...only to realize sooner that it was kinda weird with our skipper looking half-bodied.

This was how close we were to the ship! I bet if I stretched hard enough, my long fingernail could touch the surface of that glass window. 

Just in case you were wondering why we travelled away from our cruise ship, the ship in the previous picture is not ours! This.Is.Ours.

An aerial view of our speed boat.

Found this rather amusing...that's an outdoor baggage travelator to transport passengers' personal belongings into the cruise ship. Our luggages would be on it in no time!

Checked-in to our cruise!

This picture was taken when we were lining up in the same glass bridge you see over here. Yup, the queue was pretty long but the anticipation was worth every second of the wait.

We got a little closer to the entrance of our ship!

Not trying to be a spoiler here but I'll leave my cruise experience to another post just so I can get on with how we made our way to Milan (No, really. This post will never end if I continue with the details of my cruise and I don't want your eyes to go wonky but I promise that I'll fill you in with the details later!)

So, on to how we made our way after our cruise ship docked at Venice at the end of our journey with Royal Caribbean International...

Purchasing tickets to the People Mover which would take us to the Venice Train Station.

We actually paid €4.00 for two of our tickets because the first machine we encountered decided to pull a prank on us and we lost our money on it. Otherwise, it would have cost only €1.00 per ticket.

In the People Mover! It literally did its job well of moving us from one place to the other.

Upon arrival at the Venice Train Station, we decided to have our luggages checked-in for a few hours. Not very fun to be lugging all that baggage around.

It's not a free service! We had to pay...but they were nice about it.

Plus we had a friendly handler!

After a few hours of hanging around, we collected our luggages and headed to Milan via the Trenitalia. 

A huge coincidence happened in Milan and it had to do with Fashion Week. Tell you guys about it in my post on Milan!