all things cbl

We arrived in Amsterdam Schipol Airport around 10am local time. It was a rather uneventful flight. At JFK we had an hour between our connecting flights so I wanted to go into the Crown Room, since we could because of our tickets. Turns out it is just a big fancy lounge with free drinks, and food. The wireless Internet in there was TMobile and wasn’t free, but there were some workstation areas that might have had a free direct-connect hookup that was, not sure. We spent maybe 5 minutes in there because our flight was starting to board.

Once in Amsterdam and past customs, we got our Eurail passes validated and off we went to catch a train to Amsterdam Centraal. Once there, we stored our luggage and started poking around town. We took an hour-long canal boat tour and saw some of the sights from the canal. It was kind of fun to see the history of the locks and canals. After the canal boat tour we started walking through town, checking different things out and eventually made our way through the pouring rain to the museum square. We went inside of the Van Gogh museum and took a gander at three floors of paintings. Van Gogh was only on the first and second floors. Some of his earlier stuff was really quite dark. I think I’ve had my fill for art for the whole trip now. After the museum we started back to the Centraal Station to catch a train to Haarlem. We had to cross a bunch of canals on the way, went through China town and eventually caught a train to Haarlem.

Haarlem is a little town about 15 minutes outside of Amsterdam. It’s less touristy. We finally checked in around 5pm or so..once we got to the room we crashed, having been up since 8am the previous day. I would have liked to have gotten dinner around 8 or 9, but Sammi was too tired, so back to bed until 7am. Go jet-lag.

Day 2 in Haarlem was a rainy one. We went up to the tourism office and got some maps of Haarlem and surrounding villages. We started walking around Haarlem courtesy of our new map, and went into the big church in the middle of town. Did that for an hour, then, walked along the canal to the rebuilt windmill.. saw a wedding group getting their pictures in front of that, and after getting some pictures of the windmill we continued north to the station. We took an Intercity train out to Zandvoort out by the ocean. Once we got there it was windy and rainy. We pushed our way to the seashore and saw the North Sea. Once we saw it and documented the fact, we turned around and made our way to the center.. Sammi stopped at a bunch of stores looking for boots and other things. Eventually after wandering around the center of town and freezing our behinds off, we made it back to the station to catch the next train to Haarlem. Once in Haarlem we went back to the room for relaxing time, and eventually went out to dinner.

Day 3 in The Netherlands was still rainy. We had breakfast, walked around the market in the middle of Haarlem as well as walked around the center of Haarlem checking out the shops and people. We eventually checked-out and went to Amsterdam waiting for our 12:34pm train to Frankfurt. We dropped off the luggage and walked the streets doing some souvenir shopping. I called home and asked Leslie what her kids shoe sizes were. It was 3am in Utah when I called. Heh. We found a place that was selling candy, quite like that which they had back in Spain so we loaded up. We eventually caught the train and traveled through some amazing countryside into Germany and Frankfurt. Sammi had the video camera recording at times. Cologne was a fun area too.

Today (day 4) we’re going to catch the train to Rüdesheim and get on a boat and tour the Rhine. It’s not cloudy today from what we can tell, so hopefully it’ll be a good day for some touring and castle watching.

Cheers from Germany!