Day 17 - Amsterdam

Dec 30th - Day of exploring Amsterdam! After fuelling up with breakfast, we set off back to the train station to get a map & info from the tourist office. The place was completley mobbed with people...it's almost like everyone came here for New Year's celebrations or something :)

Amsterdam Train Station

About the only thing I wanted to be sure to do in Amsterdam other than just exploring the city on foot was to get to the Anne Frank House, so that was the next stop on our trek. Unfortunately when we were about 2 blocks away we saw a queue of people...that snaked it's way to the museum. We were guessing the wait would be in the vacinity of hours, so decided that we would opt for a Plan B. Our Plan B was to check out the Van Gogh Museum, which was about a 2 km walk from the Anne Frank House, so we saw more of the city on our way there. And as our luck would have it...we found an extremely long queue here as well. Oh well, maybe we were meant to spend our time just wandering today. No complaints though since it was a sunny day and Amsterdam is a great walking city, so we were happy just enjoying the views.

After some lunch and a further walk-about, we made our way to one of the local breweries tasting rooms, De Prael & sat down for a 6 sampler flight of their brews. All of their beers that we tasted were exellent...the Willy Quad was definitley the stand-out here (though we're wishing we'd had a chance to try the Mary - a barley wine, but wasn't part of the sampler). By this time our feet were sufficiently tired, so we headed back to the B&B for a short rest, and to do some planning for the rest of the trip.



We did have a good long nap, we were up & at 'em again to search out a late dinner and a stop in at a couple of beer bars before we called it an early night.

New Beers for the day: De Prael taster - Heintje (wit), Johnny (kolsch), Zwarte Riek (milk stout), Willeke (tripel), Willy (Quad), and oooh I can't remember the 6th and forgot to write it down; Grimbergen Blond; La Chouffe; Hertog Jan Pils; Tsarina Esra RIS; Oster