Friday-the neverending drive

Our Garmin GPS unit, mapquest and all the locals claim that it takes about 2 hours to drive to Amsterdam from Antwerp. They all lie. . . . .or maybe they just aren't driving with Kyle.

We left our hotel around 5pm to head towards Amsterdam. We were out of cash and decided we should probably find an ATM before leaving Antwerp. We looked up the nearest bank and luckily got stuck in some major grid iron traffic in the middle of the city. Kyle, who hates traffic more than most other things decided that the Garmin had an evil plan to ruin his life and started turning the exact opposite way than the Garmin told him to. This, surprisingly led to a rather fun "conversation" between myself and my dearly beloved. We spent a lovely 90 minutes driving in 4 block circles about 3/4 of a kilometer from our hotel. We got to see the same streets about 100 times. The best part is, we never found an ATM.

When we FINALLY made it out of the city and about halfway to Amsterdam we decided we had better stop for dinner. There is no grabbing a quick bite to eat in Europe. You can grab a sandwich at a million shops during the day but at night all quick shops close and you are left with McDonald's (or McDrive as they call it here), gas station grub (4 year old sandwiches that are mostly just bread and more of their beloved mayonnaise) or a sit down restaurant.

Europeans dine out completely differently than we do at home. Here, going out to dinner is an entire night thing. You go out to dinner and you expect to spend at least 2 hours at the restaurant. You really need to grab a snack on the way to the restaurant if you are hungry. You go in and have a seat and order drinks. Wine and soda (Coca Cola Light is what they call my beloved Diet Coke) are normally about the same price and about the same amount. No one has fountain drinks here and when you order a soda it comes out in a 6.5 oz bottle. It's normally about 2 Euro's (about $3.20 US dollars) for that bottle of soda. You get a small glass to pour your cold soda in but it's never served with ice. If you are really lucky you get a single ice cube in the bottom of your cup. At $.53 per ounce you make that soda last. If you want water at a restaurant it's bottled mineral water. I prefer mine still (without sparkles) and that's a much better value at about 5 Euro for a 1.5 litre bottle. But wine tastes better.

So we have dinner in a small town on the way that takes about 1.5 hours. We finally get to our destination about 11pm. The only problem is the hotel we show up at isn't the right one. We were actually on the wrong side of Amsterdam. I put in the street address and Amsterdam as the city. I should have put in Zaandaam, Amsterdam and the address and I would have ended up the right place.

They also do addresses weird here as well. If I were to put our address in the standard European way it would be:
Floraville Road 6064
62260 Millstadt Illinois
It's crazy confusing when trying to enter things into the Garmin that way. We were supposed to go to Provincialeweg 15, Zaandaam, Amsterdam but instead we went to Provincialeweg 15, Amsterdam, Amsterdam which is 30 minutes away. I was really loving the city at that point.

We finally got to our hotel about midnight. Luckily Amsterdam doesn't get started early so we were able to sleep in on Saturday morning.