We decided to spend our next few nights in Haarlem (The Netherlands – 15 km outside of Amsterdam) rather than the city proper in order to save some money and get some better sleep. (Taking the train into town is free since we have an unlimited eurail pass.) So we left Gent for about 4 hours of traveling. Unfortunately our first train was late so we missed a transfer and had to wait around for an hour. An hour isn’t really that bad though, so we aren’t complaining (that much). Wanting something to snack on for lunch on the train, we were hoping to find some bread to eat with the jam we already had. We conveniently found a vending machine dispensing loaves of bread…
Note to readers: never buy bread from a vending machine; it was awful. Speaking of Belgian vending machines, they also sell beer. Weird..
We made it to Haarlem but then weather was atrocious. The wind was blowing at over 30 km/h and it was raining. Hopefully the picture illustrates the situation. We had to walk about 20 minutes from the train station to the hostel (on a path that we would later find to be quite nice) in the hostile weather. We made it to the hostel, did some laundry, wrote a few blog posts and did a little planning for the next day. The hostel is pretty nice.