Leading up to the trip, I had booked a hotel for the first night in Amsterdam, and then of course the hotel in Stresa, Lake Maggiore for the five nights in Italy.
But, I had procrastinated on booking the last three nights in Amsterdam. There was only about a week left before our trip when I remembered I had not done it. So, I went on Booking.com to find an apartment. There were only a multitude of hotels, which I was ready to resign myself to booking. Some of the hotels were large canalboats, but they are had shared bathrooms. Personally, I don’t like the idea of shared bathrooms, but I can assure you Carol HATES the idea.
However, I struck gold on VRBO. I found a private Canalboat at 509 Jacob Von Leppenkade. The canal is apparently the Jacob von Leppenkade, but I'm not sure that's right. Here’s the link to Canalboat. I really liked the idea of a Canalboat, and I was sold on this one by the patio. I imagined us having our evening bottle of wine on Canal as other boats glided past. We would wave or salute them with our wine glasses and they would do the same.
And, that’s exactly what happened. And more. . .it was quite spacious, and about the same nightly price as the one-bedroom mid-range hotels popping up on Booking.com. So, for the price of hotel room, we had our own Canalboat with a patio, a good sized-kitchen, a very large living room/dining room, a bathroom bigger than we expected, and a comfortable bedroom. The WiFi worked better there than it did at our luxury hotel in Italy.
Carol made eggs and toast every morning for breakfast, and spek twice (a European bacon). We had room in the small fridge for some beer, my sparkling water, and Carol’s regular water, along with some food. We ate dinner there the first night, as Carol made tortellini in the kitchen. We dined out on the patio. It was magic.
The biggest concern with the Canalboat is that one time I would be locking the door as we were going out, fumble with the keys, and watch them sink into the Canal. Like Ralphie, I definitely would have said “oh fudge.” Fortunately my fear led me to keep a tight grip on the keys until I crossed the short wooden ramp and got on to land.
Amsterdam temperatures were mid-70s during the day and mid-50s at night, so we left the windows on the canal side open. Early one morning we were both woken by a flock of ducks flying down the canal and squawking (we fell back asleep).
The first night, after spending hours driving to Milan’s Malpensa Airport and waiting at the terminal, we stayed close to home. After grocery shopping for simple, but important items such as sparkling water, cookies, eggs, bread, we went to “Grapedistrict,” our local wineshop, and picked up a few bottles of wine for imbibing on the Canalboat patio.
I had two conference calls, and then we went for a drink at Toussaint Café, a half block from where we were staying. It came highly recommended by our host, and we immediately could see why. We sat side by side at an outdoor corner table, watching the world go our little corner of it, enjoying a drink and an appetizer, and taking in the café scene in Amsterdam.
The place was so perfect we made dinner reservations for 8:30 on Saturday night. We then went back to the Canalboat, Carol made dinner, and we relaxed into the evening on our patio. It was a perfect evening.
The Canalboat was a dream come true. We will always remember our Canalboat fondly. Highly, highly recommend!
What follows are more pictures of the Canalboat at 509 Jacob von Leppenkade than you ever expected.
No comments:
Post a Comment