At breakfast, we were joined by Theo, a guy from our tour, who had only just got in from his night out! Slowly, in drips and drabs, everyone else showed up, even those that would be staying in Amsterdam, so that they could say their final goodbyes. We wished everyone well and invited them all to visit us in South Africa. Hopefully they don't all rock up at the same time, though! I only have two spare beds. We then headed off to drop those flying that day at the airport in Amstardam, so we had another round of quick goodbyes.
After that, the coach was nice and empty, so I could spread out over a few seats and try to sleep. My jacket, which I was using as a pillow, smelled disgusting from the smokey pub crawl the night before, which was a little nauseating. Maybe it was that, or maybe I was overtired, but I couldn't fall asleep no matter how hard I tried. I gave up when we finally arrived at our lunch stop in Belgium.
The toilets in Belgium didn't have the toilet gypsies that we'd become so used to. As a result, they smelled even worse than my jacket. The door to the men's toilet was missing, so we could see them all lined up at the urinals as we passed. Luckily, there was soap and hot water because I felt quite dirty by the time I was finished!
There wasn't much interesting in the way of food, either. Nicole and I shared a Croque Monsier, though, which was very nice, and a sausage roll that thankfully tasted a lot better than it looked. There was a lot of space around the tiny little sausage and the rest of the pastry. To use us what was left of my Euros, I went to the store to buy sweets for Nicole and I to eat on the bus. Since there were no prices, I had to ask the lady at the till what the biscuits cost, then added chips, then chocolate, and kept adding and adding until we reached the full amount of what I had left. She thought it was very funny. As a result, though, we ended up eating quite a bit that day...
Back on the bus, I had no interest whatsoever in blogging or doing anything productive. My body may have been resisting sleep, but that didn't mean that I wasn't tired! Instead, we spent what was left of our journey chatting away and telling amusing stories about everything waiting for us back home. Interestingly, everyone has food cravings for things they can't wait to eat again when they get back home. I don't have that at all. Nicole thinks it's because I'm too easily impressed by everything I've been eating so far.
We got to the ferry point where we had to clear customs. Nicole got very interrogated by the British customs officials, which didn't impress her at all. I, on the other hand, was asked a series of very personal questions by a guy with tattoo sleeves. I thought he was going to end with, "so, what are you doing later?" We had an hour to wait after that before boarding the ferry where we literally just sat in the bus and waited.
Eventually, though, we were allowed on, and we picked a cosy spot in the ferry lounge where we got comfy. No one got seasick this time on the ferry, thankfully. Nicole even managed to share a sandwich with me. We sat chatting with Skye and Rebecca, who went to the Bureau de Change to convert their leftover Euros into Pounds. Rebecca has a pretty cool app on her iPad that does all the exchange rate conversions for you. Would've been helpful to convert it if I'd thought of it at the beginning of our trip.
Back on the bus, we headed off to London. We were finally driving on the left of the road again, but it felt quite unnatural after three weeks of being on the right. One thing that is strange about London traffic is that the traffic lights go orange as they transition from green to read (as ours do) and then go orange again as they transition from red to green.
It was quite late by the time we finally pulled into the hotel courtyard and unpacked the coach in the dark. There, we said our goodbyes again to Jen, Joey, and what was left of our tour group before heading to the hotel to check in. I'm really gonna miss Kaylee, so Canada is now at the top of my "must see" list.
Our room couldn't have been further away from anywhere, at five floors up and down a long corridor where the carpeting changes colours three times. What worried me was that our room card said we'd only be staying for one night rather than four, so we didn't want to unpack in case we needed to change rooms again the next day.
Everyone else decided to go out again one last time, but Nicole would have none of that nonsense from me two nights in a row. We had a quite evening on our own over pizza and free wifi. The pizza we chose had jalapeño on it, something we hadn't had for three weeks, and so we actually found it hitter than we remembered. We had become wusses!
The evening ended in the hotel lobby where Nicole checked all her Facebook updates and I tried to upload a blog. The wifi was far too slow, however, and by 10pm, I gave up and decided to call it quits and head to bed. We bumped into Kaylee, Rebecca, and some other Contiki people before heading up, though, and got to say our goodbyes one last time for the day. Then it was off to catch up on all the sleep we'd missed on the bus. I switched off my alarm in honour of the occasion. We'd be sleeping in!
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