Friday Morning, you know we only have two weeks before we are home.  Our holiday is starting to run out fast. We have breakfast in the hotel, pick up an all day rail pass and head into town on the underground, it’s five stops to Central Station.    It’s not a great day and is going to be a bit cooler than what we have been used to,  We wander out and pay 28 Euro each for a bus and two boat routes on the hop on hop off.  The queue is quite long but we get on the second bus.  Turns out  the audio in our corner of the bus is not working and we end up having to change seats.  We do a loop and a bit before hopping off and heading into a market to get some lunch.  Then back on the bus again until we can find a place to transfer to the boat. 

The boat is a much more interesting and pleasant way to view the city.  There is so much activity on the canels, boats of all different shapes and sizes doing all sorts of things.  Houseboats that seemed to have concrete foundations and are never going to move, pleasure boats with wedding parties on them to people in paddle boats that didn’t have a clue what they were doing.  It feels like they have as many canels as we would have streets.  Amsterdam is very vibrant there are people everywhere.  If we had thought there were a lot of bikes in Maastricht, there were a lot more in Amsterdam.  You were costantly in danger of getting bowled by one. 

A Bike Parking Building 

 The amazing thing was the people on them came in all shapes and sizes, well maybe that’s not quite true as they were all pretty slim and fit looking.  I need to get Margaret on a bike as you sure can cover some ground.  I have never seen a city with so many museums.  There were museums for everything, you name it they had a museum for it.  Lots of nice houses, generally narrow, many on an angle even some propped up with beams.  Wooden piles & soft ground the cause.  We finished the day getting off the boat by Anne Frank’s house, waiting a cold hour in a queue and probably an hour through the house.  A very sobering experience.

Walking back to Central Station we came across a pancake restaurant.  Not something we would get at home so we ventured in.  I had a Canadian Pancake, Bacon, cheese, mushrooms, onion and BBQ sauce .  I didn’t put the BBQ sauce on but it was really really good.  Should think about opening a chain of them at home.  Left there in the rain and fast walked back to station staying reasonably dry.

Seven Bridges

Home on the Train 

Saturday and the weather was cool but fine again.  We took the car and were off to Zaanse Schans,  a place for retired windmills.  It was fantastic and we ended up virtually spending the whole day there.  It was like a real live museum (full of other museums) where about 50 years ago some guy got the idea of saving windmills and the old Holland.  There were windmills for oil, flour, dyes (such as Rembrant would use), starch, seeds and such.  My favourite was the saw mills.  Using wind power to saw wood.  The one we went though had been rebuilt from scratch from plans of one that had been demolished in 1942 called the Het Jonge Schaap Sawmill.  We had a snack of Dutch Bitter balls with mustard for lunch, very yummy.  After  Zaanse Schans we went for a drive through the local area before driving back to the hotel.  We ate in tonight, fish on Pasta.

Tomorrow we head to an Airbnb place at Dunkirk.