We were going to take the train to Venice, however when we went to buy the ticket it priced out at €180 from Nice to Venice.
With flights being €60 a person we figured it would be much cheaper and faster to fly.
We purchased our flights while we were in the train station, and as we walked away we realized our error, we had asked for two tickets from Nice to Venice, so they were only €90 each. Still not as cheap as the flight, but a much better price.
By taking the plane we saved about five hours, we were able to sleep in, check out around 10, take the train to the airport and then get a bus transfer from the Venice airport into the city.
There are two types of public transfers into the city bus transfer or water transfer and they are only only a few Euro difference in price, but the bus transfer was advertised with the three day Vaporetto ticket and I thought it was included in the price. It was €40 for a three day event for the ticket and €8 for the bus transfer into the city.
When we got out of the bus we were in the Piazzale Roma near the western end of the Grand Canal. A bridge over the Grand Canal, the Ponte degli Scalzi(or Ponte dei Scalzi) (English: Bridge of the Barefoot [Monks]), links the bus station on the sestiere of Santa Croce to the cities northernmost island where you will find the train station Venezia Santa Lucia. (Apparently, Not the station we were to leave Venice from, but more on that in a future blog post)
As it is with most things, the first thing you see is the first thing you believe. We arrived by the bus and the train terminal and so we thought this was the tourist centre of Venice. We got quite a surprise when we went over to Piazza San Marco. (More about that later!)
The first thing we did was hop on a vapparetto and head over to our hotel. Our hotel is in on the island of Murano. The glassware creation centre of Venice. The reasonable priced hotel turned out to be quite costly with all the jewelry being sold on the sidewalks to and from the door!
