We got up and headed into town. We found ourselves in a lovely coffee shop for breakfast. The coffee shop was kid friendly and the strongest thing they had was coffee. Breakfast was probably the healthiest we have had since we have been traveling which was a great way to start the day!

There was a great market outside that had things that ranged from wedding dresses to leather purses to Buddha statues to hemp lollipops. It was a lot of fun to look around!

 

I have never seen so many people riding bikes and such organized chaos of bikes, pedestrians, cars and scooters on the roads! Business people, families, old, young…everyone rode their bikes!  We wanted to join the fun and decided to rent bikes to see the city instead of just walking around. Cat was too big to sit on the back of one of our bikes and too small to fit their smallest bike. H drove this tandem bike with her instead. Interestingly enough, his handlebars controlled the direction of the bike. The first pic is him practicing without her.

Then they were off!

In just a short time you would have thought they had been riding this bike together for years!

We stopped to watch this big boat go under the draw bridge,

And later found another market to walk thru. My mother and my neighbors, the Alvarados would have been in heaven here!

One stall had an tons of pins for sale. Books and books of them!

The market also had a park next to it and Cat scored an ice cream. H got some smoked mackerel that was being smoked onsite as well!

We rode around some more and came across the Brazil Beach Volleyball Team practicing. There is a large tournament going on in the town square right now.

We rode around some more to try to return the bikes. We knew it was close to the metro station we took into town this morning but couldn’t quite figure out how to get there.

We couldn’t find the right one. We thought we knew where it was and H the navigator was getting frustrated because things weren’t coinciding with his map. The Metro stop name didn’t match the one we were looking for. It wasn’t until the third time we saw it that we realized Sneltram was the name of the Tramline and not the station!

We have the bikes reserved until 12noon tomorrow and just locked them up somewhere near the city center. A) let’s hope we can find them in the morning and B) let’s hope they are still there.

After parking up we wandered around a bit. We found a cool toy store with this decorated bike outside.

Then we found a great restaurant, had dinner and called it a night. I thought it was funny that the restaurant sold cigarettes out of machines still. I haven’t seen one of these in years.

This is my first time here but I can only assume that being a parent in Amsterdam at night time is a completely different experience then being “kid-free”.

Either way we had a great day and I wouldn’t change a thing!