Some background, my wife and I are in our early 60's, we have cruised 6 times before this, most on Holland America and we live in the Midwest US. We had planned to take a cruise aboard the Noordam but it's itinerary got cancelled so we opted to go with this cruise which fortunately included the Explore 4 promotion.
Getting to the ship we flew to London and then used trains over several days to get to Venice including a very good trip on the Bernina Express in Switzerland. We arrived in Venice the day of our embarkation so no hotel was needed in Venice. Although I had done a lot of research, I didn't realize that we could have taken a waterbus from the train station to the Piazza Roma and avoided the bridge over the canal, but we only had a small roller bag per person plus a purse or briefcase. We had wisely shipped our big bags to and from the ship using the company Luggage Forward.
Using the people mover from the Piazza Roma to the cruise port was fairly easy as their are both escalators and elevators at each station. The cruise port sign says there is a free shuttle to the ship but none are visible so we just walked to terminal 117 where our "hotel" for the next 24 nights awaited us. It's about a half mile from the people mover to the terminal.