Day 4 - Nottingham to Newcastle and The Netherlands
Day 5 - Welcome to The Netherlands
Day 6 - Getting to know Amsterdam
Day 7 - Flowers and Fields
Day 8 - The Netherlands to Denmark, via Germany
Day 9 - Having Fun, Block by Block
Day 10 - Coping with Copenhagen
Day 11 - The Side Trip, then Home
In Summary
To think that The Netherlands was one country I was seriously considering visiting that first Europe visit in December 2014 (I came up with 3 potential trips - 2 to The Netherlands, but ended up going with the 3rd to the Harz in Germany) but its taken me over 2 years to get around to finally getting there! Amsterdam didn't feature in that trip, in fact nowhere we visited this time featured in those proposals but the ferry trip from the UK to Amsterdam did, although not from any of the ports I thought it might. Another thing to remember is that when Sasha and I were looking at visa's for Europe, if it wasn't going to be Germany it would have been The Netherlands simply because those two had the least restrictions - but The Netherlands was an unknown quantity to both of us and in hindsight having made our visit, Germany was definitely the right choice. If we had gone to The Netherlands, it would have been Amsterdam - but a city where we couldn't get away with not knowing the native language straight up and also where it is very expensive to live, I don't know we would have survived there long or gotten jobs to keep ourselves there. Had we done so, I don't feel like we would have enjoyed it the same. Berlin really leaped out to both of us during our visit there before we contemplated living in it, and while it has been trying in many ways it has also been rather brilliant. I don't think I could have said the same about living in Amsterdam.
Lastly a mention of Sweden, which managed to sneak itself in at the end. This was my 3rd visit to Sweden, even if it was for only a few hours - Malmö was very nice, but colder than Copenhagen and probably would be nicer to visit in better weather but it did have that very clean, very well presented Scandinavian charm although again, we didn't find any must-do activities there for us.
One note on the photos in this blog - the only way for me to catch up on sorting and processing the photos, and get back on track with this blog (or at least try to catch up) was to move back to processing photos through an automated batch-processing process in Photoshop which while easy and fast, the end result does not necessarily bring out the best in each photo like manual processing. I don't have the time for manual processing at the moment, so we're all just going to have to put up with the lesser photo quality for now - but at least it gives some kind of idea.