Whew! I've caught the blog up. The last few weeks has been really busy with family and the reunion, but now I'm taking some downtime in Rotterdam to relax and catch up on a bunch of things including this blog (since I've missed 6 countries and several weeks!). I've enjoyed the neat architecture - since Rotterdam was bombed a lot during the war they had the "opportunity" to rebuild much of the old part of the city, which they did using very interesting archite...

We took a train from the Normandy area of France back to Paris, then a high speed train that went 300 kph from Paris to Amsterdam. Amsterdam has changed from when I was there 36 years ago - it still has the beautiful canals and neat houses lining the canals, but the "coffeeshops" and sex shops are much more prevalent. We walked around lots, road bikes out of the city to northern Amsterdam, and took a canal tour. I also was there on the day of the Gay Pride ca...