Mongol Saga Episode III – Dusseldorf, Cologne and Amsterdam

Liz and my first year anniversary was the sixth of July, so we convinced Ryan and Michael to handle the car search on their own while Liz and I went off in tourist-like fashion. We decided to go to Cologne for the day, so after deciphering the massive rail system we hopped on a train and were there in an hour and a half. Immediately upon leaving the station we cocked our heads back to see the top of the Dom, which is absolutely massive. A lot of dirty European backpackers had the same reaction. We wandered around the Dom for a while, enjoying the tombs of the Magi, where traditionally the biblical Three Kings are buried. The Dom also has the oldest sculpture of the crucified Jesus, from a little before the year 1000 A.D. The Dom itself took several hundred years to build, beginning in the 14th century and only completed in the 1880s. But, looking at all the scaffolding you’d think they were still adding onto it. Liz and I bought tickets to enter the tour, and took a million steps up a narrow spiraling set of steps that smelled like a gym locker from the sweat of hundreds of tourists making the long climb. There was big bell halfway up, and a great view at the top.

Liz and I got rained out after leaving the Dom, so we ran through the rain back to the train station. We decided we weren’t going to pay for the train back, since the conductor never checked our tickets on the journey from Dusseldorf. Sure enough, the conductor checked our tickets right when we left the station. We convinced him we thought we had bought round trip tickets, so we evaded him for the moment. When he was coming around again we ditched the train in a rural German hamlet somewhere between Dusseldorf and Cologne, where golden crops came straight to the train tracks. We went through the town on foot, got back on the next train, and feigned sleeping to avoid the conductor. The day ended with good news from Ryan and Michael that they had several promising vehicles to look at the next day.

We successfully bought a car in Dusseldorf for about 1000 Euro, or 1200 after we paid all the registration and got our license plates. Our transport is a yellow 1999 Nissan Micra, and we are all quite fond of it. Ryan and Michael bought novelty European plates that say GREAT JOB on them, though Europe has no system for official vanity plates.

The day after buying the car we drove it northwest to The Netherlands and through fields and fields of lush green grass and holsteins grazing on the horizon. Joining the cattle every now and then were sheep, a few donkeys, and smatterings of thatched houses with moss growing on the older roofs. We went through some thick trees that covered the road, drove along some dykes, and made it to our campsite a few hours after leaving Dusseldorf. We stayed at a site popular with windsurfers called Bad Hoophuizen (http://www.badhoophuizen.nl/) and the front desk lady put us right next to the beach.

It was constantly windy and rained on and off that evening and the next day. Ryan and Michael slept surprisingly well in the back seats of the Micra and Bones and I set up our tent, which looked pitiful in the wind and especially when compared to the large tents owned by everyone else at the site. They are a kind that zips onto an RV provide very nice portable living quarters. A Dutch man lent us some extra rope and stakes to keep our tent from collapsing, and we slept well.

The next day, yesterday actually, we took the Dutch freeways to the Nissan dealership outside of Amsterdam and ordered a roof rack for the Micra – a model that was 60 Euro cheaper than the models offered in Dusseldorf, so we were pleased even though it might not get delivered to us until Monday.

Then we went to Amsterdam and after following bad directions from the hostel keeper we finally broke down and paid 9.60 Euro on parking and walked around for hours and hours – to the Centrum, through the Red Light District (it wasn’t dark yet so it wasn’t quite ‘red’), by Annefrankstraat and past four story houses built on the waters edge in the 1600s and still home to someone 400 years later. We only stopped to spend money on food at a surprisingly cheap Turkish place (I got a hot dog later). The Dam Square was impressive, with a big WWII monument, the Royal Palace and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum looming over a wide central plaza. Ryan and Michael walked around a bit more but Liz and my feet were tired of dodging thousands of bicycles all day, and headed back to the hostel in Oosterpark several blocks from the Centrum.

We woke up this morning without being able to find the power adapter that would let our laptop work in the hostel, so we went and parked the car outside of town at the lot in Zeeburg on the outskirts of the city that we couldn’t find for hours yesterday. The internet has told us that our roof rack is in, so we are going to go pick it up soon, and we will probably camp if we are going to stay in Amsterdam.

No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)