My girlfriend Erin and I have put together a Christmas Playlist for 2011 of better than average to pretty good Christmas music.
Crash Test Dummies - Good King Wenceslas - Jingle All the Way
Guster - Tiny Tree Christmas - The Christmas Gig: Two Thousand Ten
Julian Casablancas - Christmas Treat
Low - Just Like Christmas - Christmas
The Killers - Joseph, Better You Than Me (feat. Elton John, Neil Tennant) - (RED) Christmas - EP
So, while I was on my road trip (almost 6 months ago now) I took some video (mostly while I was driving). Maybe not the safest thing in the world, but I had some time to kill. I figured I would edit it all together when I get home. Put it to the tune of Mr Space Man. The hi-light of course, being the shuttle launch. Alas, no shuttle launch, at least while I was there, so I kinda lost some of my motivation to finish putting the movie together. I finally made my self finish it though. Nothing amazing, but hopefully it will help me remember how much fun I had (making it sure did).
We had to get up early to get our flight home. I got to see Clair in the morning during breakfast. Eric told her I did not cry this time when I rode the Metro.
Eric gave us a ride to airport. They have a pretty sweet ‘84 BMW (that’s 2 years older then Carol, but in a lot better shape).
The plane ride home turned out to be a lot better then the one to London. We were a little concerned going through the airport because the lines were so long, we made it through with a few minutes to spare though.
I surprised myself, and woke up just enough to mumble “goodbye” to Elysia as she was going out the door (didn’t manage to get out of bed right then though). Then me and Heather slept in longer then we wanted to. We were planning to actually go inside the Louvre today, and considering it was Sunday there might be long lines. We did manage to find time to stop for a croissant before we got on the Metro though (always a good decision). Turns out the line wasn’t too long and we got in pretty quick.
We slept a little later than usual (that’s usual for this trip, not usual for me), then we headed over to one of Paris’s premier art Museum’s the Musée d’Orsay. On our walk to the Metro we stopped at a fruit stand and a bakery for breakfast. After that I decided I would try to eat at least one croissant a day.
The Musée d’Orsay was awesome. It’s an enormous converted train station with a huge glass roof. I had not heard of it (or if I had, I had forgotten, I’m bad with names, especially those from romantic languages). Elysia thought the art there would be something more manageable in a short time then the Louvre’s so we decided to go there before Elysia had to go home.
Got up early to catch our train to Paris. One last breakfast at the hotel before checking out. I kinda like Netherland’s breakfasts. It’s mostly just bread, meat and cheese. At first it did not really feel like breakfast food, but after a few days I started looking forward to it.
We got on the tram and headed to central station (fortunately no strike that day or if they did strike again it was later in the day).
One of our main reasons for making Amsterdam on of the stops on our trip was that it was the height of Tulip season. Heather had done some research and apparently a good place to go to look a tulips is the Keukenhof gardens. They are only open for two months every year (during tulip season). They have thousands of varieties of tulips and people come from all over the world.
This turned out to be our first really nice day on our trip. We had, had some sun in England, but the days had been mostly cloudy and always a little chilly. It was sunny and got up to about 65 F.
We had been keeping an eye on the weather so we had planning to spend the day outside.
First we head out of the city to see some windmills. There was a little town Heather had researched a short train ride away called Zaanse Schans so we headed out there. It was touristy, but it was not very crowded and they have 6 operational windmills doing things like making flour, paint, and lumber. Also the town had a big chocolate factory in it so the whole place smelled like coca.
The day began with a song, through my morning haze it sounded familiar, Heather later told me it was “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I was a long way from figuring that out, when the song ended a calm voice started speaking loudly in Dutch from what sounded like just a few feet above my bed. My initial thought was that we had all slept in for way too long and the “ferry people” were in our room, telling us it was time for us to leave to boat. No one was in the room, then I noticed it was still dark out side, and the voice was coming from a loud speaker in the ceiling I had not noticed before. Then the English version of he announcement came on, explaining we had an hour before it was time to disembark. I tried to get more sleep for the next 45 minutes, alas a similar message was given every 15 minutes counting down the minutes before it was time to leave. Over all my experience on the ferry was a good one (much better then flying). However I wish there was an option to opt out of the wake up announcement. I ended up wishing we had taken a longer route or a slower ferry so we could get a full night’s sleep.
After another good night sleep and kind of a slow morning we went for a walk around Eliot and Kristine’s house. They live near a sort of Park/Nature preserve thing. It is an all open area, apparently rabbits really like it. We mostly saw people with their dogs though. We also spent some time visiting Eliot and Kristine’s very quite neighbors in a cemetery, some folks had been there since the early 1800s. After a nice walk Eliot had to go into work. We said “good bye” to him and Kristine dropped us off to look around the town of Mildenhall.