Sunday 3rd September
Early morning rise our ” I do like to be beside the seaside” alarm fades in at 6.00am rising to alarming levels, forcing us out of bed to shut the thing off. Once up we start the day, the pink haze of dawn lights up the sky outside our window.
No time for breakfast, we sleepily ready ourselves to depart, checking out at 7.30am then waiting for our ride to arrive. The black Jaguar XJ arrives right on time, the surly driver jams our suitcases into the trunk/boot and we are on our way. Early Sunday morning blues, that’s my diagnoses, the driver puts the foot to the pedal that then hits the metal and we are off like Lewis Hamilton in a Grand Prix race. Sunday morning has its advantages less traffic for one. We sped along making very good time, once again crossing the beautiful old green painted iron work of the Hammersmith bridge with its gold embellishments, and horse shoe shaped gateways.
We arrive at Heathrow airport in plenty of time, the British airways terminal alone is huge and seems quiet until we pass through security and into the departure gate area, where there seems to be thousands of people travelling somewhere. Luckily we have a lounge pass and can hole up there for a while, grab a coffee and something to eat. Our flight doesn’t have a gate allotted to it yet so we need to keep our eyes on the flight board. Some of the gates can take 15-20 minutes to walk to, but our flight does not leave until 11.45am, plenty of time to relax. We finally are allotted a gate that is only a five minute walk away. We board and take off, leaving the UK for our next adventure that begins in Amsterdam. British airways serves us a quick meal of a duck salad, very fancy but quite nice, before we are into our descent to Schiphol airport. As we fly in across the coastline we can see the towers of the army of wind generators as they rise out of the ocean below, blades rotating at full swing. When we land there is no wind, only sunshine and blue skies with scattered wispy clouds. We switch to our Australian passports, all the electronic passport entry ways lay idle with big red crosses on them. Technology has failed, that means a queue a mile long. The border control guys are just breezing through the ID process, just glancing at the passport photos and then at the faces and waving people through at a rapid rate. Are you here for the Metallica concert the agent asks me as I pass through, absolutely not is my reply. Once through we struggle through the enormous wave of travellers to the not to clear meeting point, our driver is there and soon whisks us away in his black VW station wagon, that seemingly smaller than the Jaguar swallows up our bags easily. The freeways take us quickly into Amsterdam, there it becomes more interesting as we share the narrow lanes that run along the canals with the hundreds of cyclists that are peddling madly along to where ever they are going on this Sunday afternoon. The cycling does seem frenetic, definitely we are going somewhere, this isn’t a leisurely Sunday pedal about.
With much dodging, weaving and ringing of bicycle bells together with the occasional near miss we finally reach our destination the Pulitzer hotel right on a canal. Annoyingly our room isn’t ready on our arrival and we are shunted aside with the offer of free tea, coffee and Internet services. That does placate us for awhile as we plan our next day in Amsterdam and I enjoy a great cappuccino coffee. We are out of merry old England now so the tea, err, not so good. Eventually after 90 minutes, feeling a little forgotten we check on our room, it’s ready, damn customers they always get in the way of ones day! We make our way to the room through a series of covered glass corridors that join several narrow building together to form the hotel. The room is great, on the second floor overlooking a canal, with a bridge to our right, over which endless cyclists pedal. Rows of stationary bicycles are locked up forming a line along the railings over the bridge. The canal itself is lined with small boats, wooden, steel and probably a combination of both, while larger tourist hop on hop off boats painted red or yellow cruise the canal in front of us alongside all manner of pleasure craft, clearly out for a Sunday drive, all creating a very colourful scene before our very eyes.
We unpack enough for our limited stay as the sun goes down the lights come on outside lighting up both canal and street. The light from street lamps and signs along with the orange bulbs strung around the bridges stone arches throw a shimmering reflection on the water creating a magical scene. Tired From our relatively early start we order some room service tonight, fish and chips, Dutch style, the fish of unknown variety had a white translucent flesh encased in a crispy batter, tasty and melt in the mouth but the chips, well fairly ordinary. After Hawaii we shouldn’t order this dish nothing can compare. A glass of French Chardonnay tops off the meal. We catch up on some world news, the mad north Korean is still playing at war games while Texas floods are slowly subsiding.
Another day draws to a close, as we travel further east losing another hour in time. It’s later than we think as we turn the lights out on another day.