Our Amsterdam Adventure

We started out by taking the "Fast Flying Ferry" into the city from a town right around to corner from where we were staying. It was a type of watercraft that just skimmed the surface of the water and took us right to the main trian station in Amsterdam. We then got our streetcar passes and took the streetcar to the Van Gogh museum. Alas...no photos allowed, but rest assured we saw a HUGE collection of famous and lesser known works of his, including "The Potato Eaters", "Vincent's Bedroom at Arles", and "Self-Portrait Before Easel". Vincent Van Gogh is my favorite artist so it was a treat to get to see so much of his artwork in real life. Once we finished there we walked down the street to visit the Rijks Museum. It is being renovated now but they have a collection of most popular works on display in a special "Masterpieces" exhibit, the highlight of which was Rembrandt's painting "The Night Watch".



After a picnic lunch in the park we took a walk along the canals and houses to try to visit Anne Frank's house. We were not the only ones to have this on our list of things to see and the line was much longer than we were willing to stand in so we moved on. We gave ourself a little walking tour of the streets and canals, enjoying the architecture between there and Dam Square. Our feet were ready for a rest so we took a boat canal tour to finish out our day before heading back to catch our ferry.



The schedule we looked at and the lady at the desk in the youth hostel both said that the last ferry left at 7:30PM so we were at the stop at 7:00. Bill was a bit concerned that we seemed to be the only people waiting for this ferry and I tried to remain optomistic, but as it got closer and closer to 7:30 and nobody else came and neither did the ferry we looked around and found out that on SATURDAYS the last ferry comes at 6:30! We went back into the main train station and talked to the info lady about what our options were and she advised us to take the train to Haarlem where there is a large bus station and catch a bus to where our car was parked. This ended up working for us and after a bit of confusion about which bus to take we finally got back to our car. Like Bill said to Colin..."that's what makes trips like this memorable."