Bringing Europe to a close…

Greetings to all of you freezing your rear end off in Minnesota and beyond. Well, I am going to split this post up into two separate ones, just to make it a little more understandable. I will finish telling about Europe, then write a separate post about South Africa.
I don’t think there was ever a dull moment throughout our Europe trip. When I last left off, it was Saturday and we had just experienced the atrocities of the Dachau concentration camp. Well, the next day (Sunday February 1st) was a travel day. But as I just said, the excitement never ended. We had to catch two trains in order to reach our final destination, Amsterdam. Everything with our first train went smoothly, but we were kind of nervous about our second one. We only had about 8 minutes from the time our first train was scheduled to arrive until the second one was supposed to leave. Of course our first train ended up being about 15 minutes late, our only train that was late the whole trip, so we missed our next one. It was more just an inconvenience than anything, because we were able to catch another train about three and a half hours later, it just drew our traveling out and put us a little on edge. We got to Amsterdam, took a cab to our hostel, and just hung out for the rest of the night.
On Monday morning my three travel companions departed for South Africa while I stayed in Amsterdam an extra day. Initially they were scheduled to fly on the same day as me, but their flight from Amsterdam to South Africa got cancelled about a week before we left. Basically their only option was to move everything to a day earlier. That left me to conquer Amsterdam alone. I looked at my options and decided to check out the Vincent Van Gogh museum. I found it was interesting and and eduacational. But I think, as they say, getting there was half the fun. I was pointed in the right direction, got on a trolley, and was left to figure it out. It was a little nerve racking, but I got there without too much hassle and felt empowered by my accomplishment. In the end I was glad that I got out of my comfort zone and got to know the city a little bit better. I spent the night in a dorm room hostel with five random people. After chatting and joking around a little bit I called it a relatively early night, for the next morning, I was to set sail for South Africa!
Peace,
Kirby