Daryl & Heather Overland

For Christmas we slipped out of the country (via ferry) to Amsterdam. We wanted to go to a few museums, and it turned out cheaper to buy an annual museum pass. Once we had this, however, we then felt obliged to go to every museum on the list. So we hit the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, Rembrandt's House, the Jewish Museum, Anne Frank's House, the Museum of the Dutch Resistance, the Auld Kirk and the Historical Museum. Phew! Suffice to say, Heather has a lot of work to do on her new website.

We had a lot of fun in the four days we were in Amsterdam; it was pretty exhausting, though. As usual when we visit a new city, we walked, and walked and walked. Staying in a hotel about 3km from the centre of town added somewhat to this.

Highlights were the beautiful old houses, leaning in all directions (a result of building a city on a swamp) along the many canals that circle and cross Amsterdam, the microbrewery in a windmill, the frites and, of course, the museums. Best of all was the 3-D version of Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Night Watch, which we stumbled across and was amazing. Lowlights were not being able to find an open KFC on Christmas night (Heather gets grumpy when she's hungry) and the €5 phonecard that allowed us to talk to our families for a total of about 4 minutes.


After Amsterdam we went to Rotterdam for the day, got there, thought it looked a bit boring, so dumped our stuff and went to Delft instead. Good choice, it was very nice and gave us another opportunity to cash in on our museum cards. Heather particularly liked the info centre (see below) that would print out a map with directions to any location in town.


So we've now crossed the English Channel/ North Sea using three different forms of transport; train, plane and boat. The only thing left is to swim. I guess I'd better dig those speedos out.

# posted by Daryl   1 comments    Post a Comment