Pay attention on Trains

My Friday wasn’t one of the best days I’ve had so far, so I basically went straight to the hotel from work and stayed inside the room the whole night.  I set the alarm for an early wake up to head to off to Amsterdam.  The trip was a 3 hour train ride, that I tried my hardest to turn into a longer ride.  I had one change I needed to make and the combination of being in a bit of a daze from Friday and having my head buried in a Sudoku puzzle made me miss the stop I needed to get off at.  It also made me miss the announcement (or not understand what they were saying in Dutch) that the train was terminating at that stop as well.  The train took off a little bit further and then came to a dead stop…it was only then that I realized I was the only person on the train.  I caught the conductor as he was about to get out and you can imagine the surprise on his face when he ran into me in the car.

He helped me crawl out of an emergency exit door and walked me across some tracks to get back to the platform.  The crawl up to the platform was not my most graceful moment at all.  I then had to run clear to the other end of the platform to catch the other train that had already arrived.  But other than that hiccup…the trip there was successful.

I got to spend about 5 hours in the city of Amsterdam.   Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions for the time I had there.  Unfortunately I did not get to visit the Anne Frank house, but I did wander all through the city and visited the Rijks and the Van Gogh museums.  I had wanted to visit the Heineken brewery as well, but I didn’t make it.  It started raining pretty bad once I left the Van Gogh museum so I grabbed a bite to eat and then did a little more wandering on the way back to the train station.  I did the obligatory walk through the red light district and stopped in a lot of different stores.  You guys were right, I was able to find the gag gift with no problem at all.

My train ride home lasted well over 4 hours.  They were working on the tracks so I had to divert across several different trains and some bus rides tossed in there.  I was pretty beat when I made it back to Middelburg.