We bought a day ticket on the hop on hop off boats on the canal (Amsterdam’s equivalent of the hop-on-hop-off tourist buses that you see in most major cities).
Due to a mixture of being tired, and then it rained, we ended up going round on the different routes for 4 hours!! Finally we got off and had a look around, stopping for an Amstel beer on the Amstel river (how Amsterdam got its name).
Heading back to the train station, we found ourselves walking through the red light district! We kept Charlotte from looking in the shop windows, where there were some very rough, old and fat ladies sitting, smoking, displaying their wears. We also saw the “Coffee Houses” that Amsterdam is famous for, with their liberal rules on the sale of pot. I naively wondered how someone would know if they were going in to buy a café latte or something a bit stronger!
Train back to the massive Amsterdam airport, plane, car rental, we eventually arrived at my sister Sheila’s house at about 1.30am. That day we had been on so many different types of transport: cruise ship, taxi, train, canal boat, plane and car!
