OK the last two days I walked my legs off. I also found out several times that most of these locals are very happy to help out a foreigner. Boy have I needed the help. I spent half an hour or more with the clerk at my hotel getting directions to downtown Amsterdam. He even offered to take me to the station for no charge, which I didn't need. So I only had a little problem figuring out where the station parking lot was located. Didn't think it would be 5 blocks away. Got to the train ramp only to realize I had no idea how to use the ticket machine And not reading any German didn't help! Some locals came to the rescue and helped me get the ticket. Then once I got to the Central Station I was supposed to take the Metro to get to the Waterlooplein flea market. Someone forgot to tell me that you have to go outside and down the street to get to the Metro station. More help from the locals. Waterlooplein is a very nice Flea market with the usual assortment of new junk and about half the tables with household stuff and antiques. Then I walked about a mile and a half to the Albert Cuyptmarkt Flea market but it was all new junk. From there I wound my way around to the Holland Casino (about another mile) and picked up a few chips. From there I dragged myself another mile or so to the Antique Center which was described like a flea market but it is just like an American antique mall. Indoors with lots of booths. It was unusual that almost all of the things in the antique center were small items. Took a long time to go thru it all. Then I had to drag myself another 2 miles back to the Central Station to get home. Had a great time

Today I left Amsterdam for the Bruges area of Belgium. I was supposed to stop at a flea market in Ghent tomorrow but I figured that it was only 15 minutes out of the way and that gives me more time at the Bruges and Brussels flea markets tomorrow. Wow - is that a nice flea market! No fleas only antiques. I even found some 5 Franc chips from an illegal club in Ghent. Talk about nice - how many flea markets are you going to find Daum Nancy and Galle art glass?

After the flea market I went to the hotel or at least tried. It was about 15 minutes away but I was on the smallest one lane back road you could imagine. Fortunately there was no traffic going in the other direction. After resting for a few minutes I left for the 4 casinos on the coast. Talk about a comedy of errors trying to get there. There was road construction that totally blocked about the only road to where I was going. I followed a camper (It must have been another foreigner) for about 5 minutes when both of our GPS's decided that we needed to make a U-Turn! Of course that took us back to the closed road. I finally drove back again where I did the U turn and kept going until I cleared the construction area. I was already an hour into my 30 minute trip and still had 20 minutes to go. I made it to all of the casinos and the only problem was that Casino Knokke didn't open their table games for over an hour when I was there. I never made it back since the other 3 casinos left me 30 miles to the west and I wanted to take a shortcut home. I did manage to get a 2 euro promo chip at one casino. They had about 30 women in a group and I managed to buy the chips from one lady before being run off by one of the hosts. She just could not figure out why I would not go to the cage and buy the chips

Yesterday I walked from 9 AM to 6 PM and today I left the hotel at 8AM and got back tonite at 9 PM. This was supposed to be a vacation wasn't it???