Day 55 March 19th 2009 En route to Brussels, Belgium then Amsterdam, Netherlands

Very early flight today from Ciampino airport to Brussels Charleroi airport. Katie was arriving 3 hours after me in Brussels so I had some time to burn until she arrived. I ended up finding a grassy spot outside the airport in the sun and took a nice nap against my backpack. I thought about asking to test drive some of the rental cars as a way to spend some of the time but decided against that. Did I mention that Brussels is French? Or they speak French at least. But I wasn’t expecting that, come to think of it I’m not sure what I expected in Belgium except waffles. So Katie arrived and we caught a train onwards to Amsterdam which ended up being quite humorous and a bit worrisome because we couldn’t figure out for the life of us whether we needed to change trains somewhere to get to Amsterdam or just stay on the train we were on all the way there. The conductor of the train didn’t seem to know either because one voice came on saying there was a change needed then 5 minutes later another voice came on and said this train is direct to Amsterdam. So we just literally hung on to our seats and hoped when the train stopped we would be in Amsterdam. Well we did have to switch trains eventually and finally made it to Amsterdam Centraal Station (2 a’s in Dutch). We jumped a cabbie and made it to the Hotel de Paris, a fine 3 star hotel establishment right next to the hub of Amsterdam, Leidseplein Square. We hopped over for dinner at the Satellite Bar and Grill where the TV screens are endlessly playing all sorts of sports from Irish rugby to the NCAA March Madness which I appreciated greatly as the Nova Wildcats were making a run to the final four. A burger and Heineken later and it was travel weary sleep time.