Climbing Dom Tower

So Dom Tower is the tallest building in Utrecht. It's 112.5 meters high and it can be seen from pretty much everywhere in the city. As a symbolic finish to the DLC program, a few of us Californians climbed to the very top.

There were about 500 steps to climb, but we did it in 4 sections. The first set of stairs led us to a big room with beautiful stained glass windows and a gothic style chandelier.

The second set of stairs led us to quite a small room that stored some really big, heavy bells for the tower. 

The third set of increasingly narrowing stairs brought us to an outdoor area where we could walk around the outside of the tower a little bit. The inside of this level held a giant music automatic music box thing that would ring the bells to a tune. 

The fourth set of tiny windy repetitive stairs brought us to the very top of the tower. I'm so surprised I finished the climb without hyperventilating inside the staircase. The view from the top was so beautiful even though it wasn't the clearest day. The downside was that being so high up in the air made it that much colder outside too, but it was worth it for the view. 

Our tour guide was pretty cool too. He distracted me by chatting with me on the way down so I wouldn't think about how tiny the staircase was and he ended up being a really interesting guy. I asked to get a picture with him and he came up with this fancy pose...

After a quick hot cocoa to ward me back up, we headed straight for the train station and barely caught our train for Berlin. We jumped on our train at the last possibly second and headed for Germany.