We managed to get ourselves up and into a cab at the appointed ridiculously early hour, and blundered around a nearly-deserted Centraal Station looking for our train. I suppose sometime we'll have to go back and see what Centraal Station looks like when it's not the middle of the night. We hopped on the big blue and yellow train and were on our way back to Hoek van Holland. Along the way, the predawn light got strong enough to start seeing the countryside, which was uniformly green and very, very flat. I thought the midwest U.S. was flat - it doesn't have anything on Holland. I suppose that's what happens when much of your country is reclaimed ocean, after all. After puzzling out the Dutch train schedules, we managed to change trains successfully, and as dawn was breaking we got to the Hoek and the ferry station.
Boarding the ferry was considerably less of an ordeal on this trip, and we snagged somewhat more comfortable chairs this time and made another effort to catch up on lost sleep. I'm not much good at sleeping in the daytime, though, so I grabbed some breakfast and wandered around the ship - watched some music videos, narrowly avoided spending tons of money on Dutch chocolate at the duty-free, finally succumbed and threw a pound into a slot machine in the casino (didn't win anything) and checked out the sports bar. How do you know you're in Europe? They're showing equestrian competitions in the sports bar :-)
The passengers were much less restless on this trip - a few folks wandering around like me, but not the endless hordes pacing the whole journey that we saw on the night voyage. Soon we were back in East Anglia, and catching the train to London, to meet up with the train to Edinburgh. The Edinburgh train was a Scottish-based line, apparently - at least all of the staff had lovely Scots accents. The canteen manager was my favorite - she came on the PA system after every stop, advertising the wonders of the canteen and its bacon, cheese and tomato toasties.
As we made our way north, the farms of the English midlands started giving way to the wilder hills of the Scottish sea coast - the last hour or so before arriving in Edinburgh was full of breathtakingly beautiful views of mountains and ocean.
The train station at Edinburgh was an absolute madhouse. We'd scheduled our time there when we did because it was the only two days our preferred lodging (the apartments of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society) were available. The implications of this didn't sink in until long after we'd made the reservations - that we'd be in Edinburgh during the height of the Festival (a theatre, music and arts festival of monstrous proportions) *and* the Tattoo (a showcase of military bands & marchers). As a result the city (and therefore the train station) was mobbed with people - there was a huge queue even for taxis.
We did manage to shove ourselves and our luggage into a suitably-large taxi, and headed off for Leith and the Society. Our apartment was lovely - very homey, and it even came stocked with breakfast fixings - eggs, back bacon, tea, and Weetabix. We hung around for a while, perusing the Festival listings and deciding that neither the Macbeth set in the 1970s nor the all Asian production of Turandot was quite compelling enough to go back into town for. We settled for a leisurely dinner at a nearby Italian place recommended by various past visitors in the apartment guestbook. Still plenty sleep-deprived from the Amsterdam adventure, we made an early night of it and fell asleep to the sound of rain on slate roof shingles.
Last updated 1/10/2000 by Jean Richter, richter@eecs.Berkeley.EDU