Monday morning dawned, grey and miserable with a steady drizzle. We headed for the airport in plenty of time, checked in and settled down for a quick cup of coffee before the flight. The time on the screen clicked around to 8:45 and the details for our flight to Amsterdam changed from 'Wait in lounge' to 'Estimated at 11:45'. Oh great, just great. Still, nothing to do but mooch around the meagre selection of airport shops and blog about it. No public wifi that I can see, apart from an unsecured peer to peer network in the Dixon's shop that is not connected to the internet. Ho hum ...
Ah, now that's better - just as I finished writing the last paragraph the flight time changed to 10:35 and before long we were high above the drizzle of Luton en route to the sunshine of Schippol. I barely had the chance to read a chapter of my book (Iain M Banks - The Algebraeist) before we were landing and through passport control and customs, and straight onto a double decker train to Amsterdam. Wheee!
Right, check into the hotel - it's basic, but it's handy for everywhere we want to go. The first thing to do in a new city is to go for a walk and see where your feet carry you. In our case that involved pancakes and beer in a shady pavement cafe in a little alleyway, strolling along canal banks in the late summer sunshine, window shopping in little antique shops, another drink in what we only realized in retrospect was a gay bar, and then back to the hotel to find that I could get a wifi connection - yay! The kids are now happily munching on chips and mayonaise whilst watching the trams go past on the street outside and I'm going to post this.
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