Le Tour de Amsterdam

So today is our last day in Amsterdam and there isn’t much time to site and type today. This will hopefully be short and sweet and give you an update on how we are doing and our plans for the next few days since we don’t think we will have Internet for a while.
We arrived back in Amsterdam after our one night respite in Lisse. We hiked to our hotel, which was in a pretty nice part of Amsterdam we hadn’t seen before. Since we booked our hotel with my points Jason and I were upgraded to a pretty sweet room. Basically, the hotel we were staying at bought up a city block of brownstone buildings, tore down the internal walls and turned all the rooms and attics into hotel rooms. We ended up with a room with a small living area downstairs and an attic-turned-loft upstairs with a view of the canal. It couldn’t have been a better place to stay for our last nights in Europe. Once settled Jason and I rented bikes and rode all around the city instead of walking everywhere - which was a nice break. We rode to parks and museums and to the Italian sandwich shop we frequented often over the three days we were there. We did pretty well considering the mad traffic of bicycles in Amsterdam. If you have ever been to Amsterdam you know quite well that you have to be more careful of the bicycle traffic than you do the car traffic, and we did so successfully. We visited the Anne Frank House, took a Diamond tour, had dinner in Chinatown, and of course visited the Heineken Brewery. A lot of easy fun without much hurry and overall our time was relaxing. Our last day was spent on errands and getting our luggage ready for airport transit. We shared a bottle of wine on the terrace and started to think about the journey ahead. We both feel like our “worldly” traveling truly begins tomorrow. In many ways Europe feels close to home, South Africa on the other hand definitely seems a world away. We have been traveling for six of the sixteen weeks we’ll be gone and with that perspective it seems like the rest is going to fly by. Early tomorrow morning we head back to Central Station for our last European train to the airport. We plan to get there a few hours early just in case we run into any trouble with our tickets. We should be landing in Johannesburg around 9pm and start our drive to Krugar National Park early the next morning. We don’t anticipate having internet for a few days so hopefully that will give me some time to get caught up in catching you up. ;) Thank you for reading about our European adventures…hopefully we will have some good reads from Africa.

Days Traveled: 37
Distance Traveled: 20,181km/12,613mi
Countries Visited: 13
Total train rides: 29 trains over 91 hours
Will miss most: late sunsets and European cappuccinos