Weekend in Amsterdam

One of the set of web pages that was lost a while ago when my Freeserve-hosted pages disappeared following my jumping ship to another provider told the tale of a weekend trip with the coach firm Leger.

We took quite a few trips with Leger before we discovered aeroplanes and always had fun with them. This trip was with an early digital camera and therefore photos were small - I saved most at 320x240 resolution only. That means they have been digitally enlarged for this series of articles and may be slightly less than my usual quality.

17 August 2001. We are all up at some unheard of hour in the morning for our third Leger trip after a couple of weekends in Paris. This time we are heading for Holland and the beautiful city of Amsterdam. "We" are: myself, John Burke, wife, Frances and my Mum and Dad, Evelyne and Allan. We arrive at Blackpool Tower 15 minutes early at a quarter to five in the morning to find the coach already waiting for us.

Several hours later at Dover we wait to board the ferry to Calais. The crossing takes one and a quarter hours but clocks go forward one hour on landing in Europe! (This means the return trip "takes" only 15 minutes!)

18 August 2001. Morning already?!? It had been a very long day yesterday! We are staying in the Carlton President hotel in Maarsen, about a half hour drive from Amsterdam. The rooms have full bath and separate shower en-suite facilities and the pay TV channels must be kept away from the children...! We had a brief coach tour of the city with Chris our tour guide. She was a bit of a bundle of fun our Chris... In fact a couple of years later we ran into her again, leading another set of tourists onto a coach that we were already on in Italy and she came to sit with us, claiming her own group were far too serious and boring... (whatever you think of me, dear readers, you have to admit I'm not that...)

The building above is the royal palace on Dam Square. You can tell from the elevated camera position I took this from the coach...

The coach drops us by the side of one of the many canals and we traipse onto a boat for a tour of the canals. More on this in the next entry as, for now, it looks like Miss Franny wants a quick forty winks. Also in the next entry I find a diamond on the floor of one of Amsterdam's top diamond houses and am allowed to keep it. To come in further episodes: I suffer pain in a rather sensitive spot during a trip to the Red Light District (if that doesn't make you come back nothing will...) and we applaud the tenacity of a bicycle thief!

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