Back to our Roots

Even though this is land of our forefathers, we still managed to make a mess out of the train schedules! Den Haag was on our list to see the Peace Palace, as well as the Grote Kerk in Haarlem. Great, we'll scoop up Haarlem on the same train line once we're finished in Den Haag. Well, somehow we chugged past Schiphol instead on the fast train and landed back in Centraal Station in Amsterdam. No problem, we headed north to a little place called Zaanze Schans, a quaint little town with 7 working windmills,this time taking the fast train again instead of the stop train. No problem...stop at the next station and back track. We nicely had two short stops to go before getting to our destination, when our tickets were checked and we stupidly found out we had purchased only 1 way tickets instead of return. We barely got out of paying a 30 euro fine if we promised to leave the train at the next station. So we slinked off and got the proper tickets. Now we still hadn't made it to Haarlem, so Erwin pushed and pulled me to get back on the train and complete that leg. You know how sometimes you're in a strange city and you started passing the same scenery time after time after time?.....well in the end we got our scavenges done, but it took forever!

One high point was seeing the tulip fields in bloom from the train - wonderful!

We landed in Amsterdam right in the middle of another holiday season. they are celebrating the Queens birthday, Mayday, Labor day, Freedom day and Accession day, all in the same week. So just like Athens, we had to juggle our scavenges as to what was open or closed. It was a lot of fun to practice our dutch language skills, and have locals try to figure out our accents, We got some wierd looks especially with Janice strapped to my backpack.

The most enjoyable time was renting some bikes and touring thru central Amsterdam. Many sights and experiences, especially in the red light district. Most of our scavenges happened in this central area, and included getting 3 quotes for services that can't be posted here. The cheapest was 47 Euros for half hour, that's like 150.00 bucks an hour.

Even though this was one of our most enjoyable times, we managed to have our backpack stolen at our second last scavenge. Nothing of great value was in it, except our expensive camera, lost all our Amsterdam pictures but all the rest are downloaded to the computer. Our last scavenge was the sex museum so no pictures there, just lasting memories of stuff we never knew existed. Naturally coffee and a smoke came right after....not!

We really enjoyed the food scavenges and even added a few of our own...dutch frites, croquettes, pannekoek, chocolate, cheese, herring, I think this is the first time we stuffed ourselves on mandatory food.

Everyone found their own way back to Schiphol (no problem for us, we'd passed it twice already) to get ready for the flight to Toronto, our FINAL LEG!

See you soon I guess......