R&R on the Rhine - Amsterdam

A tale of a cruise on the Rhine River:
R&R on the Rhine - Memphis to Amsterdam
R&R on the Rhine - Viking Bestla
R&R on the Rhine - Amsterdam
R&R on the Rhine - Kinderdijk
R&R on the Rhine - Cologne
R&R on the Rhine - Marksburg Castle
R&R on the Rhine - Upper Rhine Valley
R&R on the Rhine - Rudesheim
R&R on the Rhine - Heidelberg Castle
R&R on the Rhine - Heidelberg and Speyer
R&R on the Rhine - Strasbourg
R&R on the Rhine - Black Forest
R&R on the Rhine - Colmar
R&R on the Rhine - Zurich Day 1
R&R on the Rhine - Zurich Day 2
R&R on the Rhine - Zurich to Memphis

After lunch it was time to explore Amsterdam a bit.  I had two main things I wanted to see: the Anne Frank house and the Rijksmuseum.  I accomplished neither.  Thinking that we'd be ready to explore the city before lunch we had pre-booked a canal sightseeing tour.  While that wasn't a mistake it also took up most of the afternoon.

The first hurdle we faced was finding where the tour departed.  The crew members we asked didn't know but waved us in the general direction of the Centraal Train Station, which was pretty hard to miss.  It was probably a quarter to half-mile from where we were docked, an easy walk.  There were no canals on our side of the station so we tried to walk through - but you can't walk through to the other side without a ticket.  We took off down one side of the station and ran into canals and saw the tour boats but had the hardest time figuring out how to get to the other side.  Eventually C saw an underpass where we were finally able to cross over the canal and emerge on the other side of the train station.  But that little jaunt probably cost us a good 45 minutes!

Centraal Train Station in Amsterdam

There were several operators selling tour packages.  We finally found the one that matched our vouchers and stood in line for another 15 minutes or so.  Once we got our tickets we then had to stand in line to actually get on the tour boat.  And that was another 45 minutes.  So by now it had been nearly two hours since we left the boat and we really hadn't seen anything!

The boat tour itself was quite nice.  The recorded narration was in three languages: Dutch, German and English.  Naturally English was the last narration each time so we were sometimes past the point of interest before we had a clue to its importance.  The boat was glass-topped but the roof opened.  It was fairly cool as the wind blew but down below the roof line it was actually pretty comfortable.  Alas, our jet lag began to catch up with us and we really had to fight to keep from dozing off.  We knew at that point that we weren't going to see any other sights that day and we'd have to make Amsterdam a destination all its own for a later trip.

Note the hoists at the highest parts of the roofline.
Those are used to move furniture into the upper rooms.

The walk back to the ship was much quicker than the adventure walk out had been and we were able to meet up with the rest of our group.  It turned out they had stood in line for hours to see the Anne Frank house and it was very chilly that morning as they stood in line in the shade.  So a note for next time: buy tickets online before you go!

We'd heard about how much the Dutch love their bikes and we found that to be absolutely true.  People were riding bikes everywhere, even parents taking their kids to school.  There were bike lanes everywhere and we had to be careful not to get run over by them as they were often so quiet they'd sneak up on us a bit.  This parking garage for bikes just cracked us up.  We don't know how anyone would ever find their bike among all these and we've heard theft is fairly rampant but looks like there's always a large selection to choose from!

A parking garage for bicycles

Just before dinner all the passengers on the ship met up in the lounge for a few words of welcome from the crew.  They filled us in on some of the "need to know" things and then we went down to the main deck for the first of many wonderful dinners.

That night we had no issues getting to sleep as we tried to make up for a lack of it from the night before.  While we slept, the boat got underway.