Rhine Runaway – A Short Visit to Amsterdam

Other parts of this series so far:

Rhine Runaway – Booking Process
Rhine Runaway – Houston to Amsterdam

I’ll be the first to say we did not do Amsterdam justice. A combination of a few things factored into that but at the end of the day we decided we’d just have to return with Amsterdam as a destination.

I finally made it to the ship around 9:30-10:00 am and was warmly greeted. It turned out this was the maiden voyage of the Viking Bestla so all our cabins were ready. I was traveling with a group of 12 people, 10 of whom had traveled together and had already arrived. My roommate for the trip and I live in different cities from each other and from the rest of the group so we were on different flights. She was due to land a couple of hours after me so I decided to just wait for her on the boat.

Once she arrived and got settled in our cabin, it was lunch time. Since our meals were included we decided just to eat on the boat before venturing out. Amsterdam has canal tours with several companies operating them. We’d bought one online from Viator so we set out to trade our vouchers for tickets. We’d gotten some general directions as to the location of the ticket booth but they all involved walking through the Centraal Station and we came to find out that’s not possible without a ticket. (Or if it is, we couldn’t figure it out!) After a good bit of walking we finally found the ticket booth and waited about 10 minutes to pick up our tickets. Then we got in line for the boat and that killed another 45 minutes or so. At least the sun was out and the temperature was pleasant!

Centraal Station in Amsterdam with a tour boat

We finally got our turn on the boat and it was interesting. However the lack of sleep on our flights combined with the same narration in three languages (Dutch, German and English) meant we were not as alert as we’d have liked to have been. We’d hoped to go see the Anne Frank house while in Amsterdam but by that point we were just too tired and thought we’d run out of time before meeting the rest of the group for dinner.

So we saw a bit of architecture and learned a bit of history but have now added Amsterdam to the list of places to spend a few days.