April 9
We spent the morning in Bruges visiting a couple museums…. the beer and the diamond. Peter got to do a tasting at the beer museum but no free samples for Lynn at the diamond museum. We also stopped at a beautiful church. The highlight here was a statue of the Madonna and Child by Michaelangelo. As expected, it was amazing. We also wanted to visit a church that has a vial of Christ’s blood. According to legend it was brought to Bruges from Constantinople after the second crusade in the early 13th century. Unfortunately, the church closes from 1215 to 1400 and it was already 1pm when we got there. Since we still planned to visit Waterloo before getting to our flat in Utrecht, we really didn’t have time to wait. So, we’ll have to catch it on another trip.
Since we spent more time in Bruges this morning than we planned, we opted out of Waterloo and headed straight to Utrecht. It was after 5pm before we arrived so we’re glad we came straight here from Belgium.
Our original plan had been to stay here for two nights, touring the city tomorrow before heading to Amsterdam on Wednesday. Turns out, though, that lodging in Amsterdam is crazy expensive, anywhere from 200-450 euro per night even on Airbnb and HomeAway. We’re not in the least bit interested in spending that much so we decided to take the train from Utrecht instead. We’re not sure if that’s going to work as tickets coming back from Amsterdam aren’t available on the website. So….we’ll head to the train station early in the morning to see what the situation is. We can take a train into Amsterdam and if we can’t get back by train, we can take a bus. They leave every 20 minutes, but the downside is that we’ll spend who knows how long getting out of Amsterdam during rush hour traffic. We’ll take our bikes (our host has bikes for us to use) to the train station in the morning and check it all out. Our plan B is to simply hang around Utrecht tomorrow. According to our host Trudi, it’s a beautiful city so there will be plenty for us to do here if we decide to hang around and blow off Amsterdam. We’ll see how it goes. Night everyone.