Day 18 - TT European Whirl (day 1) - Amsterdam

What a long day we have had today!

 

Our morning started at 4:30am when the alarm went off (although I hadn't slept well last night worried we would sleep through the alarm!).  We madly got up and got ready and then raced down to the lobby of the motel to be held up by guest services as we hadn't been placed on the breakfast list.

 

Got that sorted to find that the tour guide had not been told they were picking us up from the hotel so the bus had gone without us.  After a quick call the bus turned around and came back and picked us up and we were on our way.

 

So at 5:15 we set off from London to Dover where at about 7:30 we passed through passport control and headed onto the ferry to cross the English Channel.

 

The ferry was a lovely P & O ship with many great facilities on board including a cafe where we could get a decent breakfast and (of course) the kids found the games arcade.  The ferry takes about 1 1/2 hours.

 

 Once we arrived in Callais we got on our new home - our Trafalgar coach!  Our tour guide is Sigi and she is just lovely.  The first thing we did on France was to reset our watches forward one hour due to the time difference so in this busy day we lost an hour!

At 11:15 we left Callais and drove past many historic ww II sites including bunkers used by the Germans.

We then drove through the north of France and into Belgium.  Sigi was full of wonderful information as we drove through.

At 2:15 we stopped briefly for a comfort stop and to grab a quick sandwich.

 By 2:45 we were back on the road again and finally at 4pm we made it to our hotel in Amsterdam.  Driving through Amsterdam was amazing - we saw lots of typical dutch sites like windmills and flowers etc but the thing that amazed me were the canals - through all the farms are irrigation canals.  The Dutch are fond of saying "God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands".  This is because they have so much reclaimed land - over 30% of land is reclaimed from old lakes etc and the canals that dot the landscape are actually a few metres below sea level.

At 5pm we were back on the bus and we headed out to explore Amsterdam.  Unfortunately it decided to rain at about this time so I couldn't get many good pics.  Walking around Amsterdam is an eye opening experience!  Not only is Marijuana and prostitution legalised and very openly for sale but the big surprise for me were the number of bicycles!  Everyone in Amsterdam rides - in fact there are over 1 MILLION bikes - that is more than 1 per person in the city of Amsterdam.

We went for a walk through Amsterdam to the old church - an area that is literally ringed by the red light district - as we walked to the church we went past all the windows with girls touting for business.  Quite a weird thing to see both things so close together!

 Then at 7pm we climbed aboard a long flat boat for a canal cruise which was simply beautiful but we were really too tired to enjoy it properly.

 

We got back to our motel at 9pm and are all just about to crash.  Very exhausting day but so many amazing sights!

 

 

Todays tally:

Steps:  8513

Time on transport:  Nearly all day

Countries seen today:  4  (England, France, Belgium and Netherlands)

Exhaustion factor:  Extreme