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Published: July 10th 2012
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Amsterday Canal
I nice pic of the Canal Our flight arrived in London, England at 7:00AM this morning and our eventual destination today is Amsterdam, Holland. I had 2 options for connecting flights 1) an 8:20AM flight which I did not think we would make or 2) a 2:30 PM flight which means a seven and a half hour layover in London Gatwick, we chose the later and this is where our story begins.
Geocaching Having anticipated this layover I thought it cleaver to plan for some geocaching in and around the airport and the surrounding town of Crowley. If you are unaware, geocaching is a very cool treasuring hunting type game. People from all over the world hide small "caches" and others, using a GPS device, look for these treasures. There are millions and millions of these hidden around the world. There were dozens with a few kilometre radius of this airport alone. If you have never tried, or heard of, geocaching, I highly recommend it. It is a great and inexpensive day well spent, while exploring and getting closer to nature. (Visit geocaching.com for tutorials and instructions). To make a long story short, we did not do any geocaching at the airport. We
Menu at Joes
Bubbles and Squeak could not find our way out of the airport after many attempts and frankly we are to tired to really want to. However, there will be more geocaching to come for sure.
Joe's Kitchen + Coffee House Being that all our trip has consisted of so far is a plane ride to England and a layover at Gatwick, this really isn't going to be an engrossing blog entry, however a few things of note have happened to make us chuckle. We have tried some local cuisine (airport diner) and came across a new dish called "bubbles and squeak". In short it is mashed potatoes with pureed veggies and such, nothing special but interesting none the less. We also came across some typical "American" tourists. Not to pick on the Americans too much as I have friends in the fine nation to the south, but this story did make me laugh. Upon arrival of their breakfast they noticed the bacon was not the same as they would expect in North America. If you are not familiar with European bacon it is a bit different. It comes in much wider strips and is leaner, less greasy, and in my opinion
less tasty. It seems to be a cross between back bacon and strip bacon. The bacon in England is not bad but it can get down right dodgy in places like Spain. The American ladies upon the arrival of their meal quickly asked the server if they could have "regular" bacon instead. The server seemed confused and after some debate a manager came over and the discussion continued as before. The restaurant staff could not understand the concept of normal bacon that the patrons were trying to get across and our American friends could not understand that what they were looking at was normal bacon (by UK standards, seeing as we are in the UK). Needless to say most people in the restaurant had a good chuckle at their expense. A good travel lesson for everyone I guess. Too be fair, I am sure I have been guilty of similar indiscretions in my youthful travelling days.
Sydney also had her first encounter with Marmite. If you are not aware of Marmite, or the equally evil Australian companion Vegemite, it is simply described on the label as concentrated yeast extracts, whatever the hell that means. In short it
is a brown paste that smells worse than it looks, and it looks terrible. It is to be ever so thinly spread on toast, as I am told by an old Australian friend. I of course being the loving and caring father that I am, felt the need to dare Sydney to eat it. Now Sydney is a smart girl and she knows her daddy is a trickster but she is also not one to back down from a well constructed dare, so of course she ate it. She is still recovering from the taste and she will forever call this culinary freak of nature "marmagoo".
Other that that not much has happened so far. We should be in Amsterdam in 6 hours and if our energy holds out a small tour of the city before dark.
Later in the day....
Amsterdam So I have been up for about 30 hours straight so take this review for what it is worth, not too much. However, my first quick impression of Amsterdam is not great. It is essentially a mecca of potheads and porn. It is filthy and there really isnt all that
much to do here, unless you are into pot and porn. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day as I have a few events planned out. We will see tomorrow.
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Jhonson Gill
non-member comment
great tour
really like both the cities amsterdam and london both are so beautiful and full of lights have a trip with friends almost 2 years ago just recently came from dordogne and that is also such a lovely place.