Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Amsterdam to Rome

It has been a busy couple of days. I got into Amsterdam on Sat. morning with no problems. Bright and early found the apartment aaron and his friend laurence were staying at. They dragged me around town for the whole day - lots of wandering plus the Rijksmuseum and the Anne Frank House (I finally went in!) I was dragging at the end of the day though. Next day we slept in and then rented bikes for the afternoon. We rode down the Amstel to Oberkirk taking in all the families out on the river for the weekend, windmills, and then having a drink at a small town pretty much shut down for Sunday.

Monday we got started late as Aaron and I tried to investigate a mysterious bus to the way out of town Weeze airport. We had a little luck but we werent positive. To get it off our minds, we all took the train to the Hague and wandered for a few hours. It had some interesting narrow streets and we entertained ourselves in the parks until dinner time. Back in Amsterdam we started to get a little worried just because we couldnt find anyone around the train station who knew there was a bus to Weeze. We found where BBS buses normally leave, and prepared to show up before midnight to catch the 12:30... Even though the website said the bus existed, and we had called the company earlier and they said it existed, we were getting fairly uneasy just because there were no signs and no one around had any clue that there was a connection to this airport!! So we show up a bit before midnight, and glory be there is a bus sitting there. We check and sure enough itàs the right one. With that we sat by the canal to relax before getting on what ended up being a completely empty except for us bus. It was actually a little creepy as it was a 3 hr bus ride to the middle of no where in the netherlands. We pulled up around 4am, and Weeze is literally in the middle of fields. It reminded me of the size of Purdues airport honestly. There were two other guys asleep on benches inside but the rest of the place was empty... The bus pulled away and we went to try to nap. People started coming in for work around 5am and the place slowly woke up. Did I mention our flight was at 7:50? Yeah, plenty of time to kill.

The rest of the trip went of without a hitch. We made it to our wonderful B&B (Home) which is about a 14 min walk from the Vatican out in a very residential area around 11am. Since then weàve been wearing ourselves out walking around Rome! It s just incredible and will require a post at a later time. Tomorrow we are catching a bus to the Tuscan town of Siena...