Amsterdam for an 11 hour tour

We figured out the train map which has its stops and schedules in English and went to the Amsterdam Central Station. From there we picked up a light rail tram (#1) to Prisengracht road. It was about a 5-7 minute walk to the Anne Frank House and museum. www.annefrank.org The walk is very pretty and very European. My kids remarked that it looked like a movie set. We were walking on cobblestone roads over the canals. The house and store fronts were all very old fashioned.
     There is no photography allowed in the Anne Frank House. You enter through a part of the museum and then make your way to the jam factory that Otto Frank ran until the war and then up to the annex. The stairs are extremely steep, more like a ladder so people with small kids or have a hard time climbing, be advised. The rooms are unfurnished, but there is a scale model laid out how it looked before the Germans ransacked the place. On the wall are excerpts from the dairy and a few video clips to guide you through. The black out curtains are still up and it really gives you a sense of how they lived hidden away for so long.

      Once you finish with the house there is more museum to give some more perspective and history, of course finishing the story of Anne's tragic death in Auschwitz a month before the camp was liberated. There is also an exhibit that tries to educated people on tolerance . It has video clips of different scenarios and thinking questions that you vote on.
      I think it was important to see and to take my older kids to. I also think it is something you tour, but don't truly digest until later.
      Our next stop was either the Van Gogh museum or the Rijksmuseum. www.rijksmuseum.nl/en I also wanted to find the I Amsterdam sign which is next to the Rijksmuseum. We took a couple wrong turns, it began to drizzle, the kids were very cold and getting beyond exhaustion. So, after we took our photo op by the sign we went into the Rijksmuseum.

Thankfully kids are free because they don't like art museums on the best of days and they were so tired by this point they were walking zombies. I found a secluded bench and told the boys to take a 15 minute nap to refresh. About 5 minutes into that a guard came over and said there is no sleeping here. I told him they traveled all night and just need a quick break to be able to keep going, but he didn't care. The guard actually came over and poked one of my kids to wake up. I told him it wasn't necessary, woke them up and walked around a little more. I realized this was basically torture for them so we decided to head back to the airport early.
    We knew which bus to catch, we just didn't know where exactly to get it. We wandered around in the rain for a bit. We nearly got run over by the bicyclists and mopeds since we didn't realize we were walking in the bike lane. Finally we found our bus and got to the airport with about 4 hours to spare. We crashed out by the gate and waited as other weary Israel bound travelers began to arrive.
The plane had ZERO entertainment, but it was fine as we all basically slept the flight away. The ticket price with a stop over made this trip a possibility, but the exhaustion factor would make me try very hard to find an alternative if at all possible.

We landed in Israel at about 2:30 local time. I picked up our rental car (the best deal I found was from www.vipcarsrental.com) and made our

way to Ramat Beit Shemesh and my sister's house. So glad to be back on the Holyland soil.