"I'm gonna buy me an airplane, fly all over your town" - Goodmorning, Little School Girl -- Grateful Dead
Whew -- where to start....I can't even put into words what a fabulous holiday we had. I was overwhelmed by the kindness and generousity of all our friends in Britain. The weirdest part was that we didn't feel like we were thousands and thousands and thousands of miles from home in a strange country with people we'd never met before. It was an odd sensation of just falling into another life -- Jo and I talked about how it felt at at moment we could say "I'm going to go home now, but give me a call later and we'll talk about what we want to do tomorrow."
But, first things first....the start of our trip was a long flight to Frankfurt, Germany where we then jumped on a train to Strasbourg, France which is in the Alsace region. When we arrived at the train station we waited for hours, seriously, for the person who was supposed to come get us. The scariest part was that we were not in a "tourist" area -- very few people spoke English and we were exhausted and just wanted to lay down. Just as we were walking down the street with all our luggage to check into a hotel room for the night, around the corner came our ride. Apparently, when we got to Frankfurt we got to the train office just in time for them to rush us onto a train that we never should have been able to make -- so we arrived in France 2 hours early. LOL. I can laugh about it now.
Once we got picked up, we met up with Dirk's parents and sister to travel to Woerth, which is about an hour or so outside of Strasbourg. We stayed in a bed and breakfast that was a 16th century farmhouse/walled fortress It was gorgeous and just a bit haunted.
France was incredible and I've never eaten so much cheese or drank so much really fabulous wine and saw some really stunning scenery. You can view the pictures we took here
Sunday afternoon it was back to the train station to make our way to the Netherlands, which required an overnight in Brussels, Belgium. We only spent a few hours there, but the first thing we did was find a bar so that we could get bottles of Chimay which is our favorite Trappist Monk beer.
Monday morning we jumped on a train to Amsterdam, which was a really beautiful trip through the countryside of Belgium and Holland.
Amsterdam, was, uh, interesting. Nothing like a city where you can see the Rijksmuseum for the Rembrandt exhibit, smoke spliffs in a cafe and watch hookers sell their wares behind glass windows on the street. We spent so much time walking around and one whole day riding a canal boat around the city, jumping on and off whenever we saw something we wanted to get a better look at.
The highlight of the trip though was meeting up with Branny -- who is a beautiful woman both inside and out. We had lunch with her and spent the afternoon wandering around town. It was sad to walk her back to the train station to say goodbye...but more on that later....
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