Parking permits are like gold in Amsterdam. You may be entitled to one but in most areas the waiting lists are between one and five years long. So many people resort to a similar arrangement as us; park outside the Mercure Hotel over the Utrechtse brug and keep an old fiets down there to cycle to and from home on.
During the four days of summer each year this isn’t too bad and we enjoy an evening stroll down to the Amstel, but for the other 361 cold, wet, dark evenings and mornings, as I watch Ron pedal off up the Rijnstraat, I do tend to roll over, snuggle back into the doona and be really glad I don’t have my drivers licence.
So the exciting news for us is that this weekend Ron and I are moving house and THE most exciting thing is that we will be getting a genuine bona-fide Amsterdam parking permit! And not in one year, two years or more but tonight! Our new landlord already has the permit and only had to transfer it to our name and vehicle.
Of course the parking permit doesn’t solve all your problems. You do still need to find a spot to put the car. But for us the parking permit really is for parking so once we are parked we tend to stay that way, for up to six weeks at a time. All we have to do now is remember WHERE we parked the car!
postcards from the north 