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Holiday

European Vacation (2011)

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At around 0430 AM on Monday April 11th we set out for nearly a week long holiday on the continent. The trip started by driving from Cambridge to Dover where we got the ferry for Calais, France. We’d arrived nearly an hour early due to a bit of bad planning on my part but also due to no traffic on the roads at that insane hour. We’d arrived at the ferry port an hour early and managed to get put on an earlier ferry.  This was was great as it meant we could get to Disney that much earlier and also avoid more rush hour traffic around Paris.

Once in France it was a very straightforward drive to get to Disneyland Paris.  I think we got checked into the hotel, “Disneyland Hotel”, about 90 mins early. Not a problem as the kept our cases for us and gave us our park tickets so we could start to enjoy the park without delay.

The kids (and you can safely assume for the rest of this posting that I am including Yuki as one of "the kids") were mental and wanted to see the characters and get on some rides.

Read on if you want to read all the details of trip SmileThis is a long read .. so brace for it Smile with tongue out

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Holland 2009 – Day 2

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Today is Lisa’s Birthday. We’ve not really planned to do too much today through, The day started about 7am to pitter patter of little feet and rain drops out on our balcony. Neither was welcomed at that hour haha. We had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Sort of a continental cum random nibbles sort of affair, but was good. Then it was off to get a tram to the Fashion and Museum District, home of the Van Gogh Museum, Diamant Museum and Rijksmuseum.

Having walked around for about 1.5mi looking at shops that apparently don’t open on on Monday until 11am, or if at all. One lessoned learned is NEVER go to Amsterdam on Monday, it’s shut!! We were looking for a tourist info booth, which should have been somewhere around the Diamant Museum, so we could buy a couple unlimited travel cards. Turns out they hide them from the tourists, never found either that was in the mile or so radius of each other, shocking. Finally managed to get some tram tickets, not the ones we wanted but whatever, got us out of the rain.

Then it was onto a tram heading towards the Central Station, looking for the Magna Plaza shopping centre. We’d missed the stop so had to fetch another tram going back the opposite direction to get back, we did that a lot today :).  After the Magna Plaza, we wandered the entire length of Nieuwendijk Street shopping area.  Ok, HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of places to go in and out of.  There must be 500 stores in about 1/2 a mile.  We finally decided to stop for lunch, the kids were starving, we were too to be fair.  We wanted to get some of the Holland pancakes.  Right, this is where our day starts to take a major shit, pardon the French but you’ll see why.

(Continue reading… it’s a beaut)

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