Northern Europe Trip 2003
UK, France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands
SUNDAY - Getting to Amsterdam




Here's the view from our hotel room of the old town, across the moat. There had been people out the night before until 3am or so, meandering around town. But now in the morning it was very quiet.





I woke up Sunday morning in Bremen with a sore throat and had had an upset stomach all night. I wasn't sure why. I talked to Jenn and she had had problems too and we both realized it had been when we got back to the room. When we went downstairs to check out people were smoking in the lobby and it hit me hard and I realized that our rooms must have been smoking rooms. Indeed, they had had matches in them but I hadn't thought of it at the time. I thought I'd ordered non-smoking rooms, but never had asked about it.

Bob had been able to dial in from the internet here, which was good. We were a bit disappointed to hear that our "free valet parking" was really 8 euros for the actual GARAGE but the VALET was free. We thought that was rather sneaky of them. The city seemed pretty closed so we decided to head out towards Amsterdam. Our hope was to get there around 4pm and be able to see a museum before they closed at 6pm.

We stopped at a McDonalds along the way to get some quick food after our attempts to find an open German restaurant failed. We did get to hear an Oom-pah band at one stop! It was intriguing that because the Germans are a formal people, the McDonalds name tags weren't first names. They were all last names, such as Herr Schmidt. Jenn got herself a little Nemo happy meal :)

On we went, driving past lots of meadows and farmland.





We figured we'd get lost in Amsterdam but it was far worse than we thought. This town is FULL of canals everywhere, one way skinny streets that end abruptly at canals and no signs. We were staying right next to the museums, and SURELY signs would point there, right? Wrong! We did get to see all parts of the city though and it was HUGE and full of quadrillions of restaurants, canal boats, torture museums, bizarre book stores, and much, much more. And TONS of bikes everywhere with their own bike paths, and electric trams too.

Sunday Day 4 Amsterdam Streets
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