Waxing lyrical about Ams

OK, I know we often fall in love with the places we go - I guess we choose well from experience - and the love affair always fades back into context when we return home. But Amsterdam really is great and we could see ourselves renting a small static barge with 2 bicycles in the Westerdok area, a peaceful urban backwater yet only 10 minutes from the centre. Rather like the way Greenwich relates to London in a vastly scaled-down way. 

As I write these ruminations we are tied up in the Westerkan, inside our first bridge - a huge road bridge that obligingly opened for us when we asked. It's a little strange being at street level with traffic and people going by, and we don't feel like leaving the boat for fear of bits being nicked. Perhaps we're being unfair to the denizens of Ams. A regular procession of motorboats come buzzing, burbling and plop-ploping past us, some with balloons, some with wine. It is perhaps the Ams equivalent of promenading, no doubt intensified by being a pleasant Sunday evening in August. Most are slow causing little wash, with the occasional plonkers drunk already and going too fast. We'll see more of those later I think. 

Meanwhile the trains regularly thunder across the bridge which will be opened for boats like us with masts after midnight when all trains have finished, thus starting the convoy south ... convoy of 1 so far though we expect more yachts to arrive after 2200.