Paris to Amsterdam Saturday July 11th, 2009

We got up early to pack up, grab a last café crème and pain au chocolate and make our 9am checkout in Paris. Then we headed out to find our car and drive to Amsterdam. I found cheaper parking at the train station, so we walked to the subway, hopped on the metro and went a few stops over to Gare de Lyon. Finding the car turned out to be a lot more trouble than I anticipated. Although I was extra careful to take photos of the car parking spot number, floor, and cross streets, we were approaching it from a different direction and while carrying a bunch of luggage. We spent a while walking around the wrong garage until we got help from an attendant, walked our way up the ramp of that garage to get to the garage next door and hike around until we find our spot.

We loaded up our stuff and got the gps out to get going, when we noticed the power cord to the gps had basically exploded when I took it out of the socket. We searched for the pieces around the car and Jon did his best to try to put it together. After a while we gave up and decided to run on battery power as long as we could. We stopped in a McDonalds in Brussels to download the route onto our iphone and that got us through to Amsterdam. It took us driving in many circles to find our hotel until we finally realized it was on a pedestrian street. Then we finally parked in a garage and checked in. After a nap, we strolled around the streets and grabbed some diner at a canal side restaurant.