Amsterdam for pre-cruise

September 11 thru 13th, 2022. We flew through Dallas to London, Heathrow airport. Then we waited for a couple of hours and caught our flight to Schiphol airport, Amsterdam. We had arranged for 4 days in Amsterdam to rest and get ready for our River cruise- Great Idea! We picked an excellent hotel in A’dam near the train station. We essentially slept for 36 hours with only 2 meals until we were ready to start exploring. Our go-to exploration technique in a new city is to start with the double-decker Hop on/off bus for a great overview of the attractions. In Amsterdam, we trumped this with the addition of a Hop-on canal cruise in addition to the normal bus tour-how cool! The other half day we spent at Amsterdam’s best museum-the Rijk’s museum. We were privileged to see Rembrandt’s major works, including the “ Night Watch”. Plus we enjoyed their very nice gift shop that collected a few of our first Euros- the dollars of the European Union. This was a day full of excellent tours! That left one other day for adventures, so we got advice from the front desk and walked over to the train station to catch a local 8 stops up to the village of Zaanse Schans, where the villagers still work their windmills to grind vegetables for flour and sell their products. It was about a 25 minute walk from the train station to the first windmills across a beautiful pedestrian bridge ( if you didn’t get run over by the bicycles 🚴- this became one of our primary concerns throughout Amsterdam). After hiking all around this village for several hours we stopped at a delicious pizza shop right along the river with a view of the working windmills😀
Returning back to Amsterdam on the train and then walking back to our restaurant we were very pleased with our day and prepared for the next days cab ride to the cruise terminal- yeehah!Read more