The Netherlands Continued...

The next day, we had a few hours before our train headed back to Frankfurt. We set up a wake up call with the front desk, so we'd have time to actually see the City of Amsterdam; or at least we thought that we set one up. We're not quite sure what happened, but we definitely didn't get a wake up call, so we slept in a little later than we planned. Luckily, we still had time to wander around and get a feel for the city.

The city definitely redeemed The Netherlands for us. What a neat place! It had some great architecture that was made even neater with the canals that run throughout the city.

View as we walked outside the train station.

While I've been doing pretty good with actually taking photos, I am a little disappointed with my lack of pictures of Amsterdam. It was really a cool place, and I only got a handful, none which i feel like really captured what the city was like.

We had planned on renting bikes since that is such a Dutchlike activity, but when it came down to it, we decided we enjoyed staying on two feet and watching all the other tourists on the very obvious rented bikes with big signs and advertisments all over. It was pretty cool to see how bike friendly of a place it is. There are bikes EVERYWHERE. I kind of wished we were there during rush hour (on a weekday), so we could see what it is like. One of my favorite things was to see a multi-level parking garage, but for bikes!

How'd you like to have to ride your bike up to the top of that?

We made our way over and saw the palace and the big town square outside, the two big cathedrals and just enjoyed seeing the beautiful city. We also went to the place that Anne Frank and her family were in hiding, but we didn't have enough time to wait in the long line to go inside before we had to catch our train.

Royal palace. Apparently the royal family is from the House of Orange, hence why so many of the things from the area are orange.

Anne Frank's House

All in all, the Amsterdam trip definitely had a lot of things go not quite as planned, but it was great! It was great way to start of our travels while we're here.