Little by little, one travels far.: Amsterdam Netherlands

For our last full day in Amsterdam we got ready ate the breakfast provided by Bob’s, which is a piece of toast and a hard boiled egg, and then walked down to a bike rental shop and rented a couple of bikes. We had heard that it was easy to take the bikes and ride in the Dutch countryside, so that’s what we attempted to do. To get there you have to take a 10-minute ferry so that is what we did and ended up in a very small town. All we were told was to follow the canal for about 30 minutes and we would be in the countryside. But seeing as how there are numerous canals throughout the Netherlands we must have followed the wrong canal because we ended up in an area that was not the nicest so we decided to look around, take a couple pictures, and then head back to Amsterdam. One of the interesting things about the Netherlands is that there are two types of freeways, a freeway for cars, and a freeway for bikes so we potentially could have taken the path toward Rotterdam but that was a 4 hour ride so we forwent that experience. Once we were back in Amsterdam we rode the bikes around the different neighborhoods in the city. After about three hours we decided that we were done riding bikes so we went to return them, grab a bite to eat and then we decided to rent a paddleboat to go through the canals. The paddleboat was a lot of fun in that we got to see the city from a different perspective. Although I was the only one that could figure out how to drive the boat so I took the position as captain of the ship. After the boat ride we decided to walk back to the hostel rather than take the tram so we could check out the city. The short walk ended up taking about an hour seeing as how we got somewhat lost. After relaxing back at the Hostel we caught the tram from the Leidsenplein, a popular square, where we grabbed some food and a couple drinks and met some local Dutch people. A couple hours later we decided to head back to the hostel and get some sleep since we had to wake up early the next morning to catch our flight back to Cork.