Quick European Vacation

We took a quick trip to Holland and Belgium over the weekend. A few facts about our trip:

-We shot 631 photos
-The dollar is at 1.60 against the Euro
-Number of one-way road driven the wrong way in our SMART car: at least 4 (possibly more)
-We had a great time
-Curiously, we experienced little to no jet-lag

On Thursday we arrived in Amsterdam and admired the canals.



The next day we explored the city. Olivia wanted to swim in Amsterdam's canals. We also went the the Van Gogh museum.



We then drove a SMART car to the lovely Belgian city of Bruges. Our decision to drive a car instead of taking the train was a new one for us. It was driven primarily by our interest in using the time we had in Europe to its fullest (the train is slower than driving). Plus, Chris had always wanted to road trip in Europe. In fact, driving a car in Europe was a lot of fun. Its not all the different from road-tripping in the US. Drivers are roughly as aggressive as in the Bay Area, freeways are about as congested, especially in Belgium. The differences are that there are no road signs in the city centers (or so it seemed) and there is little to no country music on the radio. Luckily we had a SMART car, so we could go anywhere (and we did...see facts about our trip above)



Bruges, too has canals:


The spring flowers were beautiful.



We then drove to Ghent, another medieval wonder:



Ghent had a very classic castle that we enjoyed touring very much:



The following day we drove back to the Netherlands and stopped in Leiden:



We woke the following morning and rented bikes to explore Holland's tulip region. We pedaled past fields of tulips. It was beautiful.





We have a photo album of more of our pictures from this trip which can be found here (soon).

We made a separate photo album of our flower photos (link soon!) because we took so many and they were so pretty.