With the cold European winter about to hit, we tried to get in some weekend travel before it started to become too cold. So we headed to Amsterdam for a weekend. After arriving late Friday night we headed to our B n B and went straight to bed. We started the next day by acting like locals and picked up some hire bike (although ours had a bit more branding than a local bike). Our first stop was the Hermitage museum which was temporarily housing the Van Gough collection. We found out buying our tickets before hand was a good idea and skipped the queue and headed in. This was probably a highlight of the weekend as the collection was really large and quite varied. We then went on a cycling tour where we cycled around a good portion of the city visiting a windmill, the zoo, a Jewish memorial and more. It was then time for a beer so we headed to the Heineken experience. Again buying our tickets before hand was a very good idea. The tour wasn't that great though and don't think we would recommend it. We then went to a quiet little place for dinner off the tourist path where we got some really nice food (but poor wine) and had the owner/chef come out and play the accordion. We then wandered into town where we walked around the red light district a bit where we saw some quite different sites of Amsterdam. The next day we went to the Anne Frank house before jumping on a hop-on, hop-off canal ride and headed to the Stedelijk museum. This was much more of a modern art museum than we thought and wasn't our thing so exited quite swiftly. Instead we took the boat back to Central station and went up the National Library for some nice views over Amsterdam with lunch. It was then time to drop our bikes back and head home.