After playing for hours to a wild crowd, we hung around the club until it closed at four. Chris decided to go trance-dancing until morning with some college kids he'd met, so Steve and I left him to pursue his boogie dreams and drove on to our cabin on the Ij, the giant waterway in front of Amsterdam.

It's light all the time in Amsterdam during the summer. The sun doesn't even set until close to ten, and on the way home we learned that it starts popping right back up at about four-thirty. Steve and I were hungry and he wanted gas station food so we passed the cabins and kept rolling around on a country highway looking for a gas station. Meanwhile there was all this pink and yellow dawn fog rolling in off the Ij and bright, gleaming mist rising everywhere from the grass and shrubs, and the sun was starting to get warmed up somewhere below the horizon. Their sun really takes its time while rising, and we kept driving around in this shimmering, glowing fantasyland fog along the Ij for an hour and a half until we finally found a gas station.

Once we got there, all Steve wanted was a little box of wafer-cookies. I asked the gas station man, who looked like Randy Travis, for the best thing in the store and he recommended something that I learned upon tasting was a burrito full of fish.

By the time we got home the sun was just making it over the horizon. We watched it come up right in front of our cabin, right across the glowing Ij.