August 6, 2015

We are in Amsterdam now and it is pretty awesome.  The trip here from Norway was LONG, but we broke it up into a few days to make the travel easier.  It was about 24 hours of train travel, but we made it into a couple of shorter days spending a night in Oslo and another night in Hamburg before we made it all the way down.  I think that the coolest part of the trip was that we had to take a ferry from Denmark across to Germany and they actually drive the train onto the ferry!  The tracks go straight onto the ferry and it parks there with all of the trucks…it was pretty cool!

We did (eventually) make it to Amsterdam and found a pretty good place to camp near the city with easy access to public transportation.  THe only downside is that the place is FULL of young people who are here to **cough, cough** enjoy the culture  **wink, wink** in Amsterdam.  We smelled pot pretty much 24 hours per day.  We had to have a quick “don’t use drugs” conversation with Hayden while we explained what was going on.

We spent the first day in the city walking around and it was really nice.  We did manage to find a giant wooden shoe, so of course we had to take a picture  🙂  (Can’t visit Holland without seeing a giant wooden show!)  The city itself is beautiful from the amazing train station when you first arrive to all of the buildings, the palace and the canals.

While we were walking around, we did manage to find a toy store, so Hayden (and Adam) got to check out some Legos.  We also managed to find a movie theater playing the Fantastic Four in English, so we got tickets to go the next day.  (The boys are happy!)

The next morning, (after seeing Fantastic Four), we went to the Anne Frank Museum.  The line for the museum was over 2 hours long, but definitely worth it to get the feel of what the family (and many other people) actually went through back during the war.  The museum shoes the house that the family lived in and the secret annex where thy had to hide behind the factory during those 2 years.  It’s really powerful to try and imagine having to go through that.  It’s crazy to think that it happened so recently.

Right next to the Anne Frank Museum is the church that Anne references in her diary.  She talks about hearing the church bells, but they were never allowed to leave the hiding spot.

We also went on a canal cruise which was very nice and relaxing.  The cruise went through a couple of the bigger canals and talked some about the history of the city…very interesting!  I think that I would love to live in one of the houseboats along the canal.  Lots of them have been fixed up really nicely and look pretty awesome.  Unfortunately, Amsterdam is not issuing anymore houseboat permits, so the only way to get one is to buy from someone that already owns one, so the price has been driven up to basically the same cost of a regular house!

Although we didn’t go inside (we’ve seen LOTS of palaces), the Royal Palace looked pretty cool!

Tomorrow we are going on a day trip out to the country to see the windmills, a cheese factory and a wooden show factory.  Then it’s on to Belgium for waffles and chocolate!