Day 2: Amsterdam to St.Goar

Today, we got a free morning to see some sites and walk around town. It was a little rainy but not too bad…mainly just a light drizzle. After getting dropped off in the town centre we decided to walk over to the Anne Frank house museum as a group. The Anne Frank house was a pretty surreal experience. I don’t think I said even two words to anyone while I was in there. Most people have read the story but to actually see where they lived and understand how they were able to hide for so long in the house is really amazing. Going through the house really made me appreciate the freedom that I have even to do something as simple as riding a bike. After we finished at the museum, three of us decided to walk down to the Van Gough museum. It was a pretty good walk and it was fun to see all of the different architecture and how compact the city is. The Van Gogh museum was really big and it was hard to try and see everything while trying to keep track of time. After the museum we went for some poffertjes. We went to a place that our tour manager recommended and the poffertjes were amazing. They look really small pancakes which they then put on some butter and then dump some icing sugar on.

After finishing up our snack, we now had about 30 minutes to try and get to the other side of town. We starting walking in the general direction but after a few minutes we managed to flag down a taxi. The taxi was an Audi A8 which was pretty really nice but not what I’d expect to be a taxi. The driver was really nice and spoke extremely god English. He was able to get us to our meet location just in time for us to get on the tour bus.

From Amsterdam we drove over to the Rhine Valley where we'd be staying in St. Goar. After arriving in St. Goar after about a 6 hour drive, we got into our hotel and right away there was chaos. There were four flights of stairs to go up to get to our room and there were no elevators. The stairs were packed with a lots of the people trying to get their packed heavy suitcases up the stairs. It was pretty comical sight…but after a while with people helping out, we all managed to get their suitcases to their rooms. After getting settled in our rooms and having a quick shower, we had dinner and then we went for some wine tasting. The wine tasting was held in wine cellar built in the 17th century and the current owner was gave us some different wines to taste from different harvest periods. I’m not a really big fan of wine but his wine was actually really good. I tried some ice wine and I was blown away so I ended up buying a bottle to take home. As a gift they let us keep the shot glasses that we tasted the wine from.

After the wine tasting we all went down to the hotel bar for a few drinks. I went for some German beer which was really good while most people were trying to see how many Feigling shots they could do. I think they said the next day they had about 4 boxes of 50…

- Kyle