Up this morning for a bike tour of Amsterdam. Surprisingly it seems like there are going to be more of us on bikes today than the locals as we walk the empty streets to the bike shop where we will begin the tour. Amsterdam has a huge population out and about on bikes normally, but I guess because it's Sunday morning it's empty, who knows, people recovering from the previous night, or perhaps going to church instead.

We travelled around the streets of Amsterdam thankfully on rather empty streets, because if they weren't empty I'm sure we would have had a terrible time dodging other cyclists and cars, while we had a few cars and bikes here and there it wasn't anything more than back home. We went past the Anne Frank house and could see the queues were already starting to build up a little, we took a few moments to take a few photos and then began on to he next stop, the "I am sterdam" sign to get some photos.

We arrived at the sign only to find it was packed by heaps of other people, so trying to get a photo was ridiculous. That was until one of the girls said "Let's go around to the other side" I mentioned that the words would be backwards, her response, "Just flip the photo"... Legend, that's one smart cookie, and she was right, it worked fine, as long as nothing else has writing in the correct direction on it you wouldn't have a clue the picture was reversed. After our photos were done, we continued on the bike tour and finished back at the bike shop.

The Fantastic Five took off for our last breakfast together on this trip as tomorrow Damien and Lieu don't come with us. The Cafe was only a couple of blocks away from the bike shop and was one that was recommended by one of the bike shop staff. Turns out that the Cafe is actually a New Zealand owned cafe, they even had a kiwi breakfast on the menu and the toilets even had Maori writing for male and female and some posters upstairs had Maori words on them too. I had Ryan and Meg attempt to say it and neither attempts sounded anything like it, however Megs was certainly better than Ryan's.

We finished off breakfast and headed off to a nearby flower market, it's called a flower market for a good reason... It sells flowers, and lots of them, it does however sell other little trinkets as well, so we took a look around to see if we could find anything. I actually came across some rose seeds that make a rainbow coloured rose, I'll try and bring them in, but will obviously have to declare them at customs. If I can't bring them in its not a huge loss, but they would have looked pretty if they end up growing and blossoming.

Meg and I headed off to the Heineken Experience, and the others headed off to do their own thing. The Heineken Experience was avert well put together, with lots of videos and even interactive videos, they had a sports section as well which as you walked though you could see the All Blacks shirt and hear the Maori Haka playing, you could even do a virtual kick to see if you could score a goal, but I didn't attempt that. What I did attempt however was a scrum, there were pads you could get in a scrum like position and then push hard against them, the harder you pushed the higher the number you scored. Sadly Meg bet me the first time, I couldn't believe it so we had a second go, this time swapping sides as I suspected the machine measures differently on each side. I think it did as this time I bet her, although her score was just a fraction higher than what I had scored on the machine she was now using. We didn't have much more time free, so we quickly polished off the beers we got as part of our tour and headed off to meet Lieu and Damien for some Danish Pancakes.

The Dutch pancakes known as Poffertjes, were nothing Like what I expected but in a good way, I expected just one or two small pancakes, instead I was presented with a plate of about 8 mini pancakes (about 5cm in diameter) that were rather thick, covered in chocolate sauce and icing sugar it was a dessert that a diabetic would probably collapse from having too much sugar. We then headed back to the hostel to rest up a little before this evenings dinner as we cruise on the canals of Amsterdam.

We all gathered downstairs and walked to the starting point for tonight's cruise on the Amsterdam canals, we let everyone go in front of us meaning the Fantastic Five could get our own table together, it only seemed right that we have one final meal as the 5 of us as we had spent so much time together over the last 3 or 4 weeks. As we sat down Damien and Lieu brought out gifts that they had got for Meg, Ryan and myself, meg got a Ceramic blue and white bell, Ryan got a bell that said "Ring for Sex" on it and my gift was a big white duck, well bigger than LOL Duck. We shall say that new duck is LOL Ducks Amsterdam cousin who has a bit of Viking in him as he's so much bigger. We had plenty of wine tonight as it was unlimited of drinks on the cruise tonight, but in saying that we were still reasonable with what we drank and didn't go crazy. Eloise gave a speech to thank Sabrina for her fantastic job and handed over a gift from all of us to her, this is pretty well much Sabrina's last big European trip so it was nice send her off with a gift that she can remember us by. Ronnie also got up and gave a speech to thank Sabrina and us for being a great group of people, apparently we were quite tidy compared to other groups and we all got along well with each other which meant there wasn't any conflict which was good.
About 5:30 seconds from arriving at the dock our theme song "National Express" came on, this is the last time Damien and Lieu will hear it, we all sang away to the song as it played and timing would have it, it stopped just as we landed at the dock. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it already or not, but the timing with this song from the time it starts and the time we pull into our stops has been amazing, the majority of the time it stops just as we arrive which mean Ronnie knows these roads real well as he is the one who says when to start it.

After departing to boat we went out on an unofficial pub crawl, essentially some local pubs that Sabrina knew of. At the first two or three bars we just had a few drinks and played pool at the second one, after the third bar we moved onto a bar that served shots, this bar had so many shots I couldn't even list a quarter of them, we tried a lot of different types, but there was no way we were going to get through them all. It was a fun night, but started to get a bit too crowded at the bars. We headed off and got some baguettes like the ones we had the night before, they were so good I polished off two of them. It was then off to bed.