Amsterdam wandering (Jeremy)

Despite our late return the night before, the sun heated up our tent enough that we were up and “awake” by 9:30 the next morning. Feeling a bit spent, we leisurely got downtown and went in search of the zoo. The campsite store clerk told us admission was probably around 10 euros, but that advice was accompanied with a dose of “oh man. The zoo. That’s cool man. You’re going to watch the monkeys. Wow. Nice.” So we weren’t particularly surprised when the admission was a prohibitive 18 euros.

Along the way, we stopped at a grocery store for a greek salad lunch and were about the check out when we realized we only had 3.73 between us and that was including all our 1 and 2 cent pieces. We double checked prices and figured out that what we had would cost 3.59, so we went through and handed the clerk a big handful of change with a sincere apology. She counted everything up and then handed us back the 15 or so cents in 1 and 2 cent coins that we needed to meet the total and told us that they don’t accept them. Downtrodden, we offered to put something back, but she just let us take everything, so it worked out. As soon as we left the store, we realized that we didn’t have a fork though, so we were lucky to find a small prepared food market a few blocks later that gave us plastic ware. We spent the rest of the day walking throughout the city some more, with a rainy respite on the roof of a huge ship-shaped museum called "Nemo." We also finally found some delicious Mexican food to fix our cravings.

We got back while the trams were still running and found that the back pole of our tent had collapsed in the storm. The rainfly was still over everything, so nothing got wet, but upon further inspection, the pole had shattered at one of the ends that fit into the metal joints. Not too much pole was lost though, so we were able to simply reinsert the broken end into the joint and it worked again.