Observing Amstedam - Part 5

Canal Trip

(Click Photos To Enlarge)

I wait for Terry at the Torenzicht Hotel bar on this sun-bright afternoon. I’m not sure what we’ll do, but no more bike rides, though I’m glad we took the one we did together.

He arrives on time and is a friend with Anna’s, who is tending bar today.

 

She’s got the best tattoos I’ve ever seen.

We spend some time on the front porch where she describes a short vacation trip to Malta. “Everyone was over eighty,” she laments. “Paradise Bay is the place to go when your dreams have crashed.”

Hmm. Three more years and I’ll be eighty, but my dreams are more or less fulfilled . . . I think.

“Where will you go today?” she asks me.

“I don’t know.”

“The zoo?” she offers.

“I don’t think so.”

“Zoos are great at night,” says Terry. “Used to go with friends when I was young . . . was easy to get through the fence. One night a girl got lost. Cops found her trapped in with the penguins that next morning. Didn’t do it much more after that.”

“I’d love to do the zoo at night,” I tell him.

“We can visit my friend Lance,” he says. “Lives on a boat. Might take us for a ride on the canal if we get lucky.”

We get lucky.

“That’s Lance’s boat,” he nods. “That bit of blue you see behind the white one on the left.”

 

Some people’s lives . . . I love the boat, must be some hundred feet and change from stem to stern. The green part in the photo here below is Lance’s boat. A smaller, motorboat (the bit of blue behind the green) is tied beside it.

 

Wow. We clamber on. Lance starts the engine and we’re on our way, a dream I didn’t know I had, come true. We head out. Lance is at tiller. Terry rolls a blunt. This perfect day.

 

I didn’t get much in the way of photos, too damn much to see, and smoke, and trying to figure out my cell phone photo maker, plus a Canon EOS that I feared might go overboard as we merge into an endless parade of happy people doing the canals.

 

We spend an hour or so on this aquatic labyrinth, the outboard engine chugging happily in its own rhythm, echoes off canal walls, Amsterdam delight . . . pure pleasure.

Two days left, then home again.

Entrance to the North Sea