Ducati day
- Date
- 2005-07-07 19:57 UTC
- Location
- Mira (near Venice), Italy
- Mileage
- 171 km
Yesterday was dedicated to resting, we just arranged ourselves a place at todays 11:00 tour at the Ducati factory and Museum and had some chow: The ristorante and the pizza place mentioned in previous post are two sides of the same coin, the restaurant side having air conditioning and cloth napkins (but still not expensive), also the "normal" food is very good, we also checked out ristorante Mediterrano a short walk towards Bologna, it's more expensive but also good, seems to be popular as well.
Inside factory photography was forbidden, due to privacy laws (we were not allowed to the Ducati Corse [racing and R&D] side at all [not that anyone else who doesn't work for them would be either] and the normal side is no secret) if you're going and are good at quick sketches feel free to take your sketchbook. Tour of the factory was brilliant, it was certainly nice to see how the bikes are built and the guide answered all the questions people had, for some question he didn't know the answer but right after the tour started calling various people to find it out, very helpful indeed (though I doubt this would be the case with the big group tours of saturdays, weekdays have tours for groups of up to 10 people, during high-season you might want to consider booking your visit more than a day in advance [we didn't have the benefit of knowing when exactly we would be in Bologna so we had to take the risk]). We also saw some Sport Classics (new bike, a beautiful cafe-racer not yet available) both being built and completed.
The museum side is also impressive, with first at the entrance some examples of stuff made before they started to make motorcycles (I have a wonderfull book about history of the company at home, ISBN: 076030663X), and in the main area exhibits of the motorcycles and engines trough times, inside the museum photography (and videoing) is allowed, encouraged even. The museum shop was quite small, and didn't carry anything we would want that we didn't already have.
After the tour we set out towards Venice, since thunderstorms were forecasted for the evening we decided to use the Autostrada again to get at our hotel (Riviera Dei Dogi: 45N26'17.8'', 12E08'15.7'') ahead of them, from Bologna to Mira (about 8km from Venice, bus every 30min) was 6.20EUR per bike.
The rooms have air conditioning but there is a trick to know, first make sure the switch at top of thermostat is set to the "Sun" position, then on the right hand side of the AC find a panel to open and make sure it's not on "Stop", if the AC makes too much noise, the same switch can be used to control the fan speed. Next to the hotel is a rather expensive trattoria with small portions, however the food is good and they speak also english, they also accept credit cards, we'll ask the reception about other places nearby tomorrow.
The hotel also supposedly has some sort of internet point or whatever, I'll try to find out more about it and if it's sufficient I'll post more photos (To Be Uploaded: 340MB and counting...)
There is something funky going on with the local GPRS service so I'm not able to post this for now (it did work earlier when I checked the URL for the sport classics, weird..
2005.07.10 Update
Added the ISBN of the Ducati book (076030663X)
Back to the journal...
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