We went on a Bike and Barge tour of North and South Holland in the Netherlands. We flew into Amsterdam the morning before the tour began. You can stay on the barge one night before for a small additional fee, and that way you can have a day to try overcoming jet-lag and poke around Amsterdam a bit before the tour.
We flew out on Delta, which has a non-stop flight from Portland to Amsterdam. Our experience with Delta was much better than our United flights a couple years ago, and the non-stop flight is far preferable to a layover somewhere. We flew over Greenland and Iceland, but first went over Seattle and Tacoma.
SeaTac in the foreground, Olympic Peninsula mountain tops visible in the background.
We left around 2PM and arrived in Amsterdam around 9AM, so we ostensibly flew through the night, but the sun never went down for the plane. Of course, the summer solstice was only a few days earlier.
We rode a train into Amsterdam, walked from the train station to the barge, and left our luggage in our cabins. The barge staff still had lots of preparation to do, and thus don’t want you hanging around there, so we wandered around the city for the afternoon.
We found a nice lunch at Stevens Cafe, a little local-seeming place.
(Note: Cross-reference the beer brand to the last day of our trip. (Note to note: Heineken is found everywhere in Holland, it’s the other one.))
As part of the tour fee you receive a Museumkaart (Museum card) which provides for free admission to most museums in the country. Armed with that, we entered the “Old Church” which was not only an interesting building, but which was featuring a display of World Press Photo award-winning photos. We went to the “New Church” and saw some other landmarks, but really the striking things are all the canals and boats, the old buildings (many of which are leaning), and the bicycles. Bicycles are parked everywhere, and they also seem to be trying to run you over almost everywhere you walk.
We returned to the barge in the evening and began meeting some of the other people on the tour. We went to dinner with a number of them at a restaurant on the top floor of the library, then finally (finally!) went to bed.
The Angeline (our barge) near sunset.
