Legally Blonde's Proceedings

Tuesday, July 17th was my last day of vacation, and I wanted to see some windmills!   I had booked a trip through Viator to go to the Dutch countryside.  The tour left a bit late because a fatality traffic accident had held up our bus, but they didn't cut our tour short, we just went longer into the day.  Our first stop was at a farm that makes cheese.  We got an explanation of how they make the Gouda, and then we got to sample cheese. Lots of cheese There were beautiful hydrangeas at the cheese farm.  Cheese farm?  Cheese factory?  I don't know what you should call it! The next stop was Volendam in North Holland again, the flowers were beautiful Volendam Harbor We can call this picture "What Kara did NOT eat for lunch"...  The next stop was the town of Edam More Hydrangeas! Whenever the bridge has to be raised, the same guy raises all of them.  No they aren't automated.  He rai...

I really wanted to visit Bruges, Belgium.  After doing a little research, I decided I probably didn't need a ton of time to see Bruges, so a day trip from Amsterdam would work.  There isn't a straight shot from Amsterdam to Bruges by train, so I decided to look for a tour.  I almost always book my tours for European travels via Viator.  They don't actually run the tours, but they are a good place where local tour groups are combined together.  I found a 12 hour day tour to Bruges.  After reading about the tour, and the comments (comments are always important on these), I found that this was mostly an "on your own in Bruges day", which is exactly what I wanted. We boarded a double decker travel bus and had a 3 hour (ours was a bit longer because of traffic) drive into Belgium.  From the bus drop-off, our tour guide walked us into the heart of town, giving us some direction and information as we went.  That probably lasted about 30-45 minutes, ...