July 6

7/6 - London

Today has been a travel day.  We got up early to get ready, straighten up, and head to the St. Pancras Station (all decked out in rings below!) for our train to Amsterdam.  

 

We just missed the one we were aiming for but we spent some time in the Olympic souvenir shop and even met some of Britain's Olympic basketball team!

 We took a train (the Eurostar) from London, through France, to Brussels.  We had some time to kill so we walked around Brussels for a little bit.  

 

It seemed pretty in this part that was having some sort of fair with a giant slide.  People were speaking French but we found that if we muttered a question in English someone would know how to speak it.  One thing we took note of was that the cars all stop for pedestrians and there don't seem to be many stop signs or traffic lights.  While on the train, Karen also noticed some women barely wearing lingerie in store windows... (This was only a preview  for the Red Light District in Amsterdam, little did we know...)

We plan to use our Eurail passes from this ride on, but they haven't been around to check and they also messed up when writing the dates to validate the tickets.  Mine says it is good until August 5th and Maryanne's says it is good until July 26th, which is a day before it should actually end.  Now we are just sitting on the train to Amsterdam.

7/6 - Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a fascinating city.  There are canals lining the city and probably ten bikes for every ten square feet.  There doesn't seem to be one street where nothing is happening.  The buildings are beautiful and the streets are packed.  Trams, buses, cars, and people on bikes are likely to run us over, but if we can make it here without getting hit I think the rest of our trip will be a breeze.  We were able to walk around a little bit before getting to our hotel.  We went to the hotel that Karen's family was staying at and left them a message on their room's answering machine. (Back story - Right before we left for our trip, we realized that my Uncle Jim, cousins Jimmy and Jennifer, and friend Steph would all be in Amsterdam during our trip! We decided then that if it worked out it worked out, and if it didn't it didn't, but we ended up being in Amsterdam at the same time! To be continued...)

Proof that we found the hotel where my family was staying! (Just in case we didn't actually get to see them... To be continued...)

Can you imagine carrying these bags all around Amsterdam? It's hard to tell here, but we we were cranky at this point! I know, I know, you can't picture me cranky.  But it does happen from time to time.

We took a bus to our hotel and dropped off our bags.  From there, we walked all the way back toward the station, taking in all of the sights and sounds.  The streets were packed, but that can be expected in a big city after 10 on a Friday night.  Some of our favorite streets to walk down were those that lined the canals.  We want to ask a local to take us out on their boat, bit it hasn't happened yet.  (Oh, side note - on the train Karen met someone - a few people - from Philly who now live in Germany.  One guy even went to Temple!)

Maryanne wanted in on all the bike action.

I guess we left out some details about our hotel... Probably because we were so mad.  This was the overpriced one.  We fell into a trap on booking.com (careful with that site!) because they had a flash deal where the room would cost like 40 euro.  When we checked out, it had charged us 120 euro or something ridiculous like that.  And what's worse is that it didn't even look like that nice of a hotel... It was in some shady office building and was a failed attempt at being modern.  We were not pleased AT ALL! But we paid them back... Oh yes we did... To be continued!