10-1-08, by Jodi

There was a huge rain and windstorm all night. We decide to use this as our lazy rest and a walk around Haarlem day. We just hope it clears enough tomorrow when we train into Amsterdam. Inge brings breakfast to the room at 8:30. There was a beautiful, large tray outside our door on a small table. We brought it in to the dining table and had pink grapefruit, OJ, coffee, a basket of warm bread and croissants, raspberry jam, hard-boiled eggs, and a platter of ham and cheese. Breakfast was very good and nice to eat leisurely in the room at our dining table for a change. We watched some news as the rain the wind raged outside. Our Internet connection went out, we suppose because of the bad weather.

Haarlem

By noon, the rain stopped and sky partly cleared so we decided to try for a walk. We walked up to the main square, admiring the Dutch homes, buildings, churches and canals. We continued on to the train station to check it out for tomorrow and ended up buying our round trip tickets into Amsterdam, E6 each. By 2 pm we had walked the whole town and the hard rain had started again.

Lunch

We went back to the room to eat our lunch, leftover breakfast items, enough to make sandwiches. It felt good to just be lazy, I ended up taking a short nap while Terry read. Later that afternoon we walked over to the Hotel garage and checked in on the car. Then went to the grocery store and bought cans of soup to heat in our room microwave for a small dinner. We also had some crackers in our snack stash and some stinky Alp cheese I had bought at a cheese shop down the street. It was nice to have a whole day not going out to eat. We read and watched some TV until bed, while the rain and wind continued storming.

Still no Internet today.