Oh Monday...Must you always come?

Oh Monday, why do you always come so fast? I apologize for my blogging absence. This is the longest time I haven’t blog since I started this. Many fun and exciting things have happened since Wednesday. First, we went to Keukenhof on Thursday and on Friday I headed to Germany for a weekend with my host parents. I got back last night.

So about this journey home…..I jumped on a train in Halle, Germany at 2:07 Sunday afternoon. I crawled into bed at 12:03 Monday morning. What should have been a 7 hour journey turned into a 10 hour torture. Apparently, our train had an accident somewhere outside of Amersfoort, Holland. We endured a 75 minute delay full of police walking up and down the outside of the train, Deutsche Bahn (DB) people walking, and the train conductor making announcements out of breath. No idea what happened. I Googled but didn’t find anything. Well after this accident our train is kaput. Yup, that’s what they said, a literal German translation. The English translation: broken; such elegance with the languages. It got a chuckle out of all of the passengers, at least in my car. We also had to wait for an alternative driver. This was fun. By the time our train got going, there was a group standing outside where our engine car would have been (I’m assuming).

Our train was originally headed to Schipol. I’m glad I wasn’t on that train playing roulette with a plane to catch! I just wanted to get home. I’m also glad I brought a 600+ page book with me to read. It’s almost finished. I started it on the journey. The trained ended in Amersfoort, well before the place where I was supposed to get off. So I get off (I don’t have a choice) and another train headed to Amsterdam Centraal is set to arrive at 10:29. All sorts of trains had delays. I don’t know why or how much was the domino effect or if something was going on with the train power grid. I finally arrive in Haarlem at 11:30. I have to figure out the busses. Now, I know how one bus line works. The others, no idea. I ask around and I’m told to wait for bus 140. Ok, I can handle that. The bus is parked there, but the driver is nowhere in sight. It isn’t schedule to leave until 11:44 so I way the 10 minutes. The driver shows up and I ask to verify and he tells me to ride till Tempeliersstraat. I can handle that. It’s only about 3 stops and takes 4 minutes. The good part of this journey, I discovered the Tempeliersstraat stop. The stop we knew about only 1 bus goes there. The other, about 10 different lines swing by. When headed to the train station, any of them work so it was nice to know that we have so many options at our fingertips.

I was so tired by the time I got home last night. I really wanted to wake up early and say good bye to Kelly’s mom but I didn’t hear a thing until my alarm went off well after they had left. Whoops. I’m sorry! I hope you have a safe trip home and it was so nice to meet you!

I am now exhausted today and don’t really want to get into a recount of everything just yet. It is too overwhelming for my brain this morning. I do want to leave you with a teaser picture though.

I believe my mom will be here this Friday in celebration of my birthday. I'm excited. Another fun week and weekend of touring!!