Friday night was disturbed somewhat by a music festival going on in a field a few hundred metres outside the camp, which finished at 3am and started again around 7am on Saturday morning! Lara woke once, and took a few minutes to settle again, but I somehow managed to sleep through it from 12.30 or so! Poor Olga couldn't and stayed up until it went quiet at 3am! It seems music festivals are popular in this area, and we wouldn't have minded so much if The Killers or Rolling Stones had been headlining, but this was mostly Dutch pop mixed with Drum'n'Bass, (me, down wiv da kidz, innit). Nothing the camp staff could do about it, so we just accepted it as one of those things. We drove into the suburbs of Amsterdam yesterday morning, found a place to park on the streets and bought a day travel ticket from a machine that helpfully had instructions in English, and took a tram to Central Station, and made up our own walking tour of Amsterdam, based on my memory from previous visits. The weather was lovely, blue skies and hot, and after doing a bit of shopping and a boat tour of the canals, Lara fell asleep and Olga and I treated ourselves to dinner in an Argentinian restaurant, which seems to be a popular choice here. Then it was a tram back to the car and we were home by 8.30pm. It was really easy to get into the centre actually, probably helped by being the weekend, but being in the big city made a change from the leafy (if noisy) atmosphere here. How on earth there aren't more injuries and fatalities amongst cyclists in Amsterdam is a mystery - no helmets, kids on the crossbar, passengers on the luggage seat-thingy behind the rider... Anyway, we didn't see even the merest crashette.
Today we're having a lazy day back at camp, it's a little more cloudy now, though still t-shirt and shorts weather. We've promised Lara another trip to the Water Park, and this time we're trying to convince her to go underwater briefly. I'm not sure she's convinced it's a good idea...
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