Farfalle parkrun and Padua

 Slightly nerve wracking start to the day because we were taking the train 34 kilometres from Venice to Padua for the Farfalle parkrun.

The reason for the worry was that the trains were on strike today, although apparently they were running an essential only service.

However, all went well, our lovely double decker train arrived as planned and took us straight there. We arrived at the parkrun with 15 minutes to spare and admired their homemade timing clock.

It was a cold four lapper and as always, extremely friendly and with lots of treats afterwards including coffee and prosecco.

Then it was back to Padua for a look around.

It's an ancient university town, although much smaller than Venice. In the centre was a superb plaza with a central fountain, then a sort of canal surrounding it with lots of amazing statues on top of plinths that looked like giant chess pieces.

I was also pleased to see that they had the same style of clock as in Venice that started with 6pm at the top.

After this burst of culture we walked back to the station for our essential journey back to Venice.

Unfortunately the strikers had other ideas and there was no trains in sight and hundreds of confused people milling around.

After finding out that no one had any idea when there would be another train, but that the strike ended at 9pm, we decided to go to the bus station.

That was confusing too, but we did manage to find a bus, and feeling very relieved we climbed aboard and got a seat. The timetable said that it took 90 minutes and had 50 stops which I thought very unlikely, but it turned out to be true and we got back on the island at about 3.30pm.

Making the best of it, I can say that it was a pretty route that we wouldn't have seen if we had caught the 25 minute train. And it was nice to have a sit down as we walked over 33,000 steps in total today.