It was an early start. We were awake by 5am so that we could get ready for the day. We headed down for breakfast at 6am. We hopped on the coach for a really quick trip to St Pancras where we went through security and passport control before boarding the EuroStar to France and on to Belgium.
I barely noticed the tunnel. We made our way through the English countryside and through a few tunnels before a longer one and then we passed a sign welcoming us to France.
The French countryside was lovely and we soon arrived in Brussels, Belgium. The whole trip from London to Brussels took about 2 hours and was very smooth. No clicketty clack which is nice because we were travelling at 300km an hour!
We transferred from the train to the coach in Brussels and drove through the town before heading into the motorway to make our way toward Amsterdam in The Netherlands.
The whole way from England to Amsterdam the land is not unlike Australia. There are paddocks, animals and trees but the buildings are different. They are more like cottages and even in the towns like Brussels the building have a quaint, cottage look. We stopped at the Belgium-Netherlands border for a drink and something to eat.
We arrived in Amsterdam and headed off to explore straight away. We bought some frites with mayonnaise and wandered up and down the Main Street before heading off on our dinner cruise.
The dinner cruise took about 2 hours and we ate traditional Dutch food as we motored along looking at all the beautiful buildings, boats and houseboats. We even saw Anne Frank's house and the museum of bags and shoes.
It is absolutely beautiful here. Bikes everywhere. They have their own lane and have right of way. They ring their bell and if you don't move will just run over you. Our cruise was perfect and we saw so much of Amsterdam that you just couldn't see if you tried to walk around it. Lots of canals and beautiful bridges. Everybody rides really crappy bikes and locks them up with locks worth more than the bike. They're all black bikes. The city decided to buy 100 white bikes for anybody to use. You could ride it and when you had finished with it, just leave it in a rack for somebody else to use. Within 24 hours there weren't any white bikes but 100 stolen white bikes were painted black. They are very open to anything...as long as you're not hurting anybody else, it's legal....except speeding. They don't like speeding and you can't do that. Anything else is fine though.