Maxima

Monday, acting real Dutch, we walked to the Waterbus which took us to Dordrecht where we walked to the train station. Blips got tickets to Amsterdam Centraal Station from the machine. Our train was in the station and leaving in 12 minutes. Woo Hoo, what luck. We took the upper deck seats with a lovely view of koeien(cows), schapen(sheep) and grafitti. We stopped at Rotterdam, Den Haag, Leiden, Schiphol-airport and finally Amsterdam Centraal at 12 noon.

We checked our map and headed for our hotel. There were so many things and people to look at, that we took two wrong turns but still arrived at the hotel 25 minutes early at 1:35PM. Our hotel is all no smoking(yeah!) A warm friendly welcome and we head to the third floor. I had forgotten that zero is the bottom floor, so we are going up 4 flights of stairs. Good for our fitness We unload our backpacks and head out for coffee. Stopping at a terrace on the Dam, where the waitress was blunt and snotty, our coffee and apple pie was 14 Euro or $19.00 Yikes!!! Coffee was good and pie was mediocre.

A beautiful sunny afternoon calls for a canal tour on a boat. Blips had a great picture taking marathon, 216 pictures. We got outside seats but while waiting for the boat to go, the fumes were making me sick. So, I waited inside until the boat took off. While inside, an American couple sat down across from me. There were discussing their day so far. He told her, “I lost more than the map. I took my watch off my wrist and put it in my pocket and BAM, it was gone!” I had to hold back my giggles. It is called pick-pocket, NOT pick-wrist.

There were some great looking Indonesian and Shoarma restaurants but we have had quite a lot of that lately, so we pick Italian. Blips orders lasagna. It had ham in it making Blips quite happy. I had chicken pizza with the thinnest crust ever making me happy. We sat in the no smoking area. Since there were no ash trays, the table next to us asked for one and promply lit up 3 cigarettes. Welcome to Amsterdam! It rained while we ate but again was beautiful as we walked 10 minutes to our hotel. Up those 4 flights of stairs to our third floor room.

And tomorrow is Tuesday