The Road Trip Begins

As I said before, our plan was to drive to Amsterdam, explore and stay the night and then head to Meppen, Germany Wednesday morning. Well, that was the plan until we actually drove into Amsterdam. We checked a few hotels online before departing and had one in mind, so once we arrived in Amsterdam we were hoping to find the hotel, park the car and then head out on the town. After driving around for over an HOUR in the middle of Amsterdam, going down the same streets maybe 5 or 6 times, we were beginning to think we made a bad decision. There were hundreds upon hundreds of bikes going up and down the sidewalks and down the street. Some streets were only wide enough to fit one car (and I really mean one car) and we managed to find streets that were filled with people and more bikes!

We finally came across our hotel, but found no parking so we had to do more circling around which then made us get lost again! It was now over an hour we had been driving and Andrew was at his wits end so we hopped right back on the interstate and headed to Meppen, Germany. We were all a little disappointed we didn't get to walk around the city, but figured we probably saw about all there is to see in Amsterdam by car! We managed to snap some pictures through the car windows, so we have proof we were there.

Meppen, Germany was on the list of places to see because there is a small town near where Andrew's family grew up (Brussels, Illinois) called Meppen, Illinois. Meppen, Germany is a small town with a population of around 35,000 people. It definitely was a change of pace from where we just came from, which is a good thing! We arrived in Meppen about 2 hours after we finally decided to leave Amsterdam and checked into the Alstadt Hotel. It was a small German-like hotel and was a perfect place for us to just sit and unwind! We walked the streets for a little bit before heading back into our room for the night.

In the morning we had plans of waking up and just walking through out the town!