I was paying attention to the boats. It was important to choose a boat company that had multiple boats in order to make use of the hop-on/hop-off ticket. Holland International seemed to have the most boats, followed by Lovers and another company with a Dutch name. Most of the lines sold tickets on the dock near the central train station.
But when we came out of the Anne Frank house and headed down Prinzengracht, what did we see but a place to buy canal boat tickets. Did we remember to check and see which boat line the tickets were for? No, we did not. Did we think to ask them how many boats they had? No, we did not. We just bought the 24-hour hop-on/hop-off tickets. The boat was coming in 15 minutes. A number of boats came by and stopped, but they were not "our" boat. Our boat appeared 15 minutes after the designated time and it was empty. Seems that this was the first trip of the day and the boat ran until 8 PM. Essentially, because we bought our ticket before the boat even started its rounds, we did not actually have a 24-hour tickets because they would expire before service restarted in the morning. Okay, we would just have to make the most of it until 8 PM. We did the one hour tour and then hopped off for lunch.
The boat company offered different routes, red and purple. There were about four stops in common so you could switch from one route to the other. We had already taken the red route so after lunch, we headed to one of the common stops so we could hop on the boat for the purple route. We waited, and waited, and waited some more. Obviously it was late. I suppose it is difficult to stick to a timetable when you don't know how many people will be getting on or off at any given stop. Allow for baby strollers and people with limited mobility and the timetable can be off. But finally the boat appeared and the captain waved to all of the people standing and waiting. Then as he went by without stopping he told us that the next boat would be along in 10 minutes. We could see why, that boat was crammed full. So we all stood in line and waited for what seemed like an eternity, even though it was actually about 30 minutes. The next boat has room for us. But guess what? It was not a purple route boat, we were now back on the red route boat.We'd already heard all the commentary on this route. We wanted to go on the purple route.
I questioned the captain about where we could off to get the purple route boat. It turns out that this particular boat company does not have a boat that comes by every fifteen minutes like Holland International or Lovers. It turns out that this particular boat company has two boats, one for the red route and one for the purple route, which means that a boat turns up every hour or so. The purple boat was then about 30 minutes ahead of the red boat. The purple boat was full and there was no guarantee that anyone would get off unless they were only on the one hour tour which did not begin at the same place as the red route tour. Bottom line, we could stay on the red boat and get off at the next common stop and then stand around for 30 to 40 minutes until the purple route boat came back. There would be no guarantee that it wouldn't be full again and in theory, we could wait there until it stopped running at 8 PM and never get on. Another option was to chase it on foot and hope that someone got off somewhere. Another option was to chalk the experience up to a lapse in memory, or perhaps judgement and get on with enjoying Amsterdam.We opted to get on with it.
But while we were on the red route boat, we did take some lovely pictures.
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