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.

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.

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.

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.

At last, I got a chance to sleep in. Eliot and Kristine’s couch was very comfortable. We took our time getting started. We had done a lot of stuff the last 3 days and we were pretty tired. We had been warned to watch out for some of the neighborhood cats. In England, Eliot and Kristine explained to us, the rules/customs about how animals are handled are a lot different. Cats can not be de-clawed and are basically given free reign.

I was able to sleep a little bit more on Saturday morning, but I was still out of bed by 7. The three of us went down to Starbucks again to get on the Internet. Starbucks was closed. It did not open until 8am. I assumed Starbucks would have some international rule about opening early. I guess not. So we hung out in a small park until it opened. We walked over to Buckingham Palace, and took some pictures in front of the palace.

I was looking forward to a long nights sleep, which I needed. Good’ol jet lag kicked in and I was up at 5:00am. Which would have been about 11pm at home, so I have no idea what went on there. I was hoping to get caught up later that night. I went down to a coffee shop at 6am, got on the Internet and finished up some work I had left over from the day before.

After work I went home, threw the rest of my stuff together, I missed my bus downtown (or it just never came, who knows). Fortunately, I have a roommate who was happy to take me downtown (thanks Ben). Then I took the light rail to the international airport. I met Heather there. We said “goodbye” to our bags and headed through security. I can’t remember the last time there was no line at security.