in the land of swiss cheese and other beautiful things!

some pictures--> amsterdam & keukenhof gardens

 

mommy home safe...

:)

Saturday, March 20

So we have arrived back in Odense. Our plan was to get me a bike and ride out into the country side.  Unfortunately, it is very foggy and very rainy.  I've been surfing the web while Beth takes a little nap.

The stores don't open here until 10:00 and they close at 1:00.    We will have a little while to get some last minute shopping in before we start the big pack.

We will be leaving the dorm on Sunday morning at 7:00 so we have time to walk with all the luggage 20 minutes get a train and ride for 2 hours and make it to the airport by 10:00.  I fly out at 12:15 in the afternoon. It's a wonderful 10 days.....yes with some tension once in a while.  But overall it was very good. Since we were on a train ALL NIGHT.  7 pm to 8 am my body is sitting here rocking back and forth.  What a crazy feeling!!

Yesterday, Friday, we went to see the Anne Frank house.  Very interesting.  While walking in the streets I was thinking about all the Jews that walked along the same streets on their way to the trains.  Very sad.  They are doing some renovations so a couple of the displays were closed.  We did see how and where the family lived.  They still don't know who revealed there hiding place.  I'm glad I had read the book before I came.  It gave me some background knowledge.

After the Frank house we went back to the hostel where we had stored out luggage and started back for the train station.  We stored everything there in a locker while we headed to the Keukenhof Gardens in Lisse, Holland, “The most beautiful spring garden in the world".  Once again we are off on the train and then we need to find the bus to take us to the country.  Unfortunately, it's cold and rainy.  We also find out that they had a hard freezer a couple of weeks ago so not many flowers are blooming.  :-(  It's still very beautiful and they have many flowers inside the buildings to look at and marvel at.  We did ask about bring bulbs home.  There are too many regulations to bring them to the states.  So the best way to order is on line.  Also, they don't dig the bulbs until September.

We give ourselves 2 hours to make the bus trip and the train trip back to Amsterdam to get our night train at 7pm.   We were doing awesome was even going to be able to get drinks and a snack before our train leaves. We were outside the station about 1/2 mile and they lost electricity to our train.  Not a big deal...we still have 1 hour and 15 mins to make the train.....we wait.....time ticks by.........and wait.....finally a train conductor came and we asked how long it would be....she was sure....so we tell her we have another night train to Denmark at this time is 6:35 and Beth was getting very worried.  We didn't want to stay another night in Amsterdam.   Finally the train starts to move...very slowly.  But we got back to the station at 6:45.  Remember we still need to go get our luggage out of the lockers and make it back to the platform in 15 minutes.  So off we go.  Running.  What a sight, I'm sure so we get to our lockers that are across the train station and we head back to the platforms.  The lady had anounced over the train that our night train would leave from 11b. So we were off and running again with all our bags. The train we had problems with was in that platform so we had to ask another person about the train location. Finding out it was on platform 4b right next to the luggage lockers... Off we ran again. 

We made it with time to spare thank goodness. 

We have had a long day of packing and doing some last minute things. We will mess with pictures next week sometime once we have recovered. 

Thanks for reading. Must get some sleep before Deb heads back to the states. 

Thursday--March 18th

So this morning we got up a little later. We got out of the hostel by 10:00 am after trying to be quiet for the other guest in our hostel room. We were quiet until 8:30 and I think that is pretty nice (Beth)...

We went back up the crazy hill... WOW... soooooooo very steep!!! (We saw a sign that showed it was between 12-15% grade in most places! And we thought the summit to Laramie was bad with a 5% grade!)

We went back so that we could look at the huge Cathedral at the top of the city. The Cathedral was built around 1300, it was huge inside with absolutely beautiful stainglass windows. We were disapoited that we could not read any of the information on the posters around the church because they were all in French... Oh well.

After that we walked down a huge hill that we just climed to the metro station below. From that metro we went down to the water (Lake Geneva) to check out the port city of Ouchy (pronouced oh-she... but looks like ouch! i hurt myself... hehe!) It was so cute! We walked along the shore in awe of the scene before us. We walked to the Olympic Museum. The gardens were so nice in front of the museum along with fountians making it a great precurser to the great muesuem at the top of yet another hill.

In the museum we were able to see up close all of the torches, and medals from each of the games. Along with Grecean artifacts, and other game memorablila. We also saw a few short movies about the spirit of the games, etc...

After the museum we walked back along the water and found the perfect place for some lunch... Crepes!!!! :)  I had a bacon and cheese crepe while my mom had a crepe with spinich and cheese. They were soooooooo yummy!

We took the metro up the side of the city again to our hostel were we then quicky collected our bags before hitching a train to Geneva Airport. We got there too early but we hung out and grabbed some snacks before our flight. We flew out of Geneva at 7:05 this evening and we arrived to our hoste (lost the paper with the address and had mom worried that I wasn't going to find it without an address, thank goodness i had checked it out on google maps weeks before and it somehow stuck in my head!!!) Our room is called the Zoo or (Artis in Dutch).

I am glad my mom finally made some new friends on the plane. So far she had not been talking to many people because of the huge language difference. But finally some nice Dutch guys visited with us the entire time on our flight! :) One was a personal buttler for a Dutch couple who live in Geneva while the other was a student at a conservatory in Switzerland for classical trombone.

The computer here is not able to download pictures on to the blog either but we have lots of good ones to show you all!

We will update on Saturday night because after a day in Amsterdam we will take a night train back to Odense Friday night. Woooooot! Haha!

Have a great rest of your day we are headed up to bed.

wednesday, March 17, 2010

We are unable to upload any photos at this Hostel.  So you will need to look at another time.

We have traveled all day on a Scenic Train from Lucerne to Lausanne & what a BEAUTIFUL RIDE.

We stopped Interlaken and walked around the cute shop along the main street.

We only stayed in Interlaken for an hour and a half before we went on our next train that stopped at Ziessmann (spelling check later on that name!)

The view was amazing though the alps... winding around and going over bridges and tunnels!

The water in the lakes... oh my goodness... the most pure blue aqua color you can imagine!!!! Just amazing!!!!!!

From Zwissmann we switched onto a fancy train with HUGE windows for the last leg of our senic train ((check out http://www.goldenpass.ch/default.asp?OrgID=6&LinkID=247))

But our last train stopped at the town of Montreux on the most eastern corner of Lake Geneva. It was so cool to come out of the mountains and wind down the mountain through these cute little towns!

We then took another train to the city where we are staying tonight: Lausanne. What an adorable city!!

We decided to walk into the city center. Oh my gosh it feels like everything is uphill!!! Like my mom said ''I thought San Fransico had hills!!!''

We walked up to the church and could not find an open door but we will go back tomorrow... except not walking we got some metro-bus cards from the hostel... think that is a good plan!!!

We are now just hanging out at the hostel... think we might go to bed pretty early since we are tired and everything is closed up anyways... get a headstart on the morning tomorrow!!

We will make sure to upload pictures as soon as we can because  they are amazing!!!!

Remember you can always post comments we love feedback!!! :)

Have a Happy St. Patricks day!!!!

tuesday---

(( 1st picture: view from our window))

((2nd: Small side chapel in the large JesuitKirche in the center of Luzern))

((3rd:First stop on our ferry trip on Lake Lucerne at Vitznau...Very Foggy!))

((4th: Mt. Stanserhorn through the fog around noon))

((5th: The town of Vitznau))
((6th: fog finally cleared-clearing at Weggis another town we stopped off in for an hour!))

((Mt. Pilatus=2132km high))

((Center of Lucerne with Mt. Pilatus))

((Mommy and Bethy on the ferry nearing Lucerne after exploring the other side of the lake!))

Out of computer time. Will write details later!! :)