A Half A Day In Rotterdam

It’s been a while since i posted here, but … Haven’t been doing much travelling lately, nobody wants to hear about needful but unpleasant trips to to the dentist, and if I posted work-related stuff I’d probably get fired.
However, I had a couple of days of “use it or lose it” leave to use before the end of March (5 days carried over from 2023, 2.5 used on Bank Holidays & a dentist trip), so I’d booked the days off without having a solid plan for what I was going to do with them, then came up with the plan somewhat at the last minute. There were probably more sensible ways to do things, but … This is what I did.

Train to London, then train to Harwich
Night boat to Hoek van Holland
Metro to Rotterdam
Spent the day mooching about in Rotterdam
Metro back to Hoek van Holland
Night boat back to Harwich
Train to London, mooched about in London for a bit

Something to note: The Night Boat back to the UK doesn’t get you to London until 0900 or so, so there’s no way I could start work at my regular time unless I took my work laptop on holiday with me (which HR have made abundantly clear they’re not keen on). The Day Boat gets back to London sufficiently late that I could just make the last train back ‘home’, but only if absolutely nothing goes wrong, and it’s still 0100 or so, which is a bit late for a work night. Thus, two night-boat trips.

This’ll be fairly picture-heavy, so I’ll put in a cut.

Stena Line do a Rail+Sail ticket to the Netherlands (and probably to other places too), so I just had to get myself to London, and then to Liverpool Street Station. Had a half-day ( to use up the aforementioned use-it-or-lose-it leave, so there was no particular rush.
Conveniently, the station is right beside the ferry terminal; There were very few walk-on passengers ( not many passengers of any sort, in fact; Even the truckers-only restaurant I accidentally wandered into was mostly deserted, and you’d generally only see or hear people in the bar/cafe/restaurant bit on the 9th deck )

Part of the admittedly stupid goal here was to take a boat to another country in a circumstance where someone actually cared; I’ve done the ferry to Dublin, but that was in 2014, so the passport control kiosks were unoccupied, and nobody looked at my passport.
This time, they did.
There was a check of the ticket once boarding started.
Then there was an actual security scan, with metal detector & a bag-scanning machine.
Then a British Border Control Officer to look at my passport & ask some questions about purpose & length of trip; The ‘one day’ thing was a bit unusual, it seems, but they seemed to get the “it’s all the leave I had to use” aspect of things. Or they didn’t really care.
Then there was another passport check, but this time so that I could be issued with my room key (a cardboard thing with I’m guessing an RFID chip in it or something, but it had my details and the room+deck number printed on it), a breakfast voucher (it was pretty late when we boarded, so I had dinner in London, but figured I’d want breakfast the next day), and a voucher thing that could be scanned for onboard purchases so that I’d get loyalty points.

On board … It’s a bit like an odd hotel. An odd empty hotel.
There’s a picture of the deck plan way down the bottom of the post, and the stairs did have colour codes for navigation purposes, but given that it was pretty damn empty, I just climbed until I hit the right deck & followed the signs until I found my cabin. ( Distinct Starship Titanic vibes, for anyone who remembers that game? )
I went with the cheapest of the “I’d Like A Window” options, and it was pretty nice. Comfy bed, my own bathroom, and a decent view. (Though I did end up closing the blind to sleep; There was no light out there to shine in, but the lights on the hull were close enough to light up the room, so I must have been pretty close to one of them)

Slept well, but I expected to; For some reason I sleep well on any transport that isn’t an aircraft; Most of the time this means that I fall asleep on tour buses and long train trips, but it does pay off for the overnight journeys.
Breakfast was … Unremarkable, but the view out the front of the ship was good.

First thing I saw when I looked out the window? Someone riding a black upright bicycle with a basket along a cycle path on a dike.

Got my passport checked by the Dutch Authorities on arrival; Again, they thought the one-day trip was a bit odd, but seemed to accept my reason. Or they genuinely didn’t care.
Much like at Harwich, there was a train station right outside the terminal at Hoek van Holland; It worked the same as the London Underground, where you just tap a contactless bank card on the way in & out of the station, so I didn’t have to try to understand any ticket vending machines.
I could have transferred from this local system to an intercity one, and made the trip to Amsterdam or Den Haag, but with a fairly limited time frame I didn’t want to spend too much of it on a train. Plus, now that I’ve made this frist attempt and have some idea of how the thing works, I can be a smidge more adventurous on a subsequent trip?

Didn’t realise that the “Santa Claus” statue there was in Eendrachtsplein; I picked that station to get off at because of a canal & sculpture trail, and had a moment of ‘why do I recognise a thing I’ve never seen’ when I spotted it – It has appeared in many funny internet posts over the years.
Mostly I just wandered around, looked at things, followed paths to see where they went ( including across a bridge at one point ), and marveled at the amount of cycle infrastructure & bicycles.

Next stop, on the recommendation of a friend, was the area around Blaak station.
Lots of architecture, lots of art, and the Old Harbour.

The cube houses are things I’d seen pictures of, so I took the opportunity to have a look around the one that’s set up as a museum. The interior space does work, though there are a lot of steep stairs, and many opportunities to hit your head on things.
They kind of reminded me of the capsule apartment tower in Japan, where the furnishings and fittings and appliances were all designed for that space.

Fries/Frites/Chips/Whatever, in a paper cone, with Mayo & a little wooden fork, purchased from a stall in Markthal once I got done with staring at the roof of the place.
You can’t really see it in my picture, but there’s a huge mural(?) on the roof.

Also, after wandering for a bit and finding a somewhat underground shopping area, an municipal marble race thing, based on Rotterdam. I’m assuming that you put a coin in that thing that looks like a gumball machine and get a bunch of marbles.

After a lot of wandering around … I was kind of done. I did something like 25km of walking that day, according to my watch-tracker, so it’s not that surprising.
After a while, as the afternoon crept on, I spent a bit of time people-watching in the square (so many bicycles, and so much of the infrastructure is built to make it a shared space; Ramps incorporated into the design of steps/seating, and those groove track things beside staircase to walk a bike up & down), and then hopped the metro back to the ferry terminal.
I got there a bit before boarding time, but not too early, and had a similar boarding/passport experience, though the Dutch authorities didn’t scan my bags (they did ask what I’d done on my day in Rotterdam, and probably regretted asking the question after I gave a potted review of the Cube Houses, and the Library, and the Sculpture Trail by the Canal, … )

Slightly more people on this trip, in that I saw other folks in the hallways & on the stairs a couple of times, but it still wasn’t crowded. The vehicle deck was empty on the way over (at least the bit I could see was), but full of Truck+Trailer units for the return trip; I’m assuming the drivers were mostly in the Truckers-Only section, because there weren’t that many more people in the bar or restaurant.

Again, slept well on the trip back.
I went for the dinner option, on the grounds that boat arrives in the UK early enough that Breakfast would be unreasonably early, especially when I was heading into London, where many fine breakfast places exist.