Bicycle travel also part of the authentic experience

Channelling my inner Amsterdammer, I sleep in a canal boat and then cycle in the rain. It’s all part of making my visit to the Dutch capital as authentic, and unique, as possible.

I’ve been to Amsterdam before and stayed at DoubleTree, which is a very nice chain hotel with well-located properties.

But this time around, I yearned for the quintessentially quirky and the delightfully Dutch.

Officially, I’m in Amsterdam to drop by Booking.com headquarters and learn more about the wildly successful website that’s helped more than one billion people rent vacation and business trip accommodation.

Most of that activity is naturally hotel rooms.

But Booking.com also has 29 other types of accommodation in its inventory of 25 million bookable units worldwide, from tree houses, apartments and safari tents to country villas, resorts and igloos.

So, in an ode to being in canal-andboat-crazy Amsterdam and it being the company’s hometown, I, of course, utilize Booking.com to secure the canal boat.

In fact, Booking.com lists 80 different canal boats available for rent on its website.

I choose the elegant Prinsenboot on the famous Prinsengracht canal lined with shops, restaurants and those distinctive 17th Century tall houses.

The former barge has been converted into three comfortable and modern nautical-style suites.

It’s so soothing to sleep in the cushy bed while the water laps against the vessel and later sip a Heineken on the deck with a canal and tall house view.

My choice of Holland’s best-known