TRIPLE PLAY

 Trip Date: Jun 17-18, 2019

 

Finally.  It's only been 14 months since we got back, so it's about time I got around to documenting one of our best trips ever.  It all started with a casual comment by DIL Meghan about doing a family vacation somewhere.  She tossed out biking through Holland, and Loni immediately ate it up.  Biking?  Us?  Yeah, we have bikes, and they get trotted out maybe once a year if we're lucky.  But we're dead game sports, right?  And, Meghan offered to do the legwork!  Well, all righty.  After many weeks of researching, she came up with a company and a plan.  Cough up the dough (cough, hack!) and we'll be ready to go with a late June start date for the tour.

Of course, I couldn't leave it at that.  After all, we're paying big bucko's  for the flights over and back, so we have to amortize them to the max, right?  After Holland, the kids were going to go visit friends in Stockholm, so we would be on our own.  I dove into some research of my own for options to extend our stay.  After much digging, the stars aligned and we had our plan.  Right after the end of our bike tour, there was an 7-day cruise to the Norwegian fjords on Holland America Line, departing from and returning to Amsterdam.  Then, our old favorite, Collette Tours, was running a 9-day "Imperial Cities" tour starting in Prague, then Vienna, and finishing in Budapest, with a day stop in Bratislava thrown in.  It started two days after the cruise got back, so we added a quick train trip to Berlin to pass the time.  This all sounds so smooth now, but the planning, tickets, reservations, etc. were, um, challenging.  Once done, we started practicing on the bikes, set up an itinerary, and waited for the big day.

Chuck picked us up and ferried us to LAX and to British Air.  This was my big mistake of the trip.  Chasing a reasonable fare for economy+, I made the bonehead decision to use connecting flights instead of direct to Amsterdam.  We'd fly to Heathrow and change for the hop across the Channel.  Of course, this adds mucho hours to an already long, sleepless day and night.  We had a 4.5 hour layover.  Ugh.  I will say that I managed to snag the primo seats in the eco+ category, and we had virtually no complaint with the plane (an ancient but just-refurbished 747 at the end of its life), the seats, the entertainment (I think I watched 4 movies), or even the food.  We were off!

We came in right over London on our approach to Heathrow, and had a fine view of the London "Eye" below, all 443 feet of it.  Heathrow is huge, and we walked for an eternity to get to our departure terminal for the next leg.  This does not bode well for our return, when we will have only 90 minutes to connect from our flight from Budapest to our flight home.  Worse, we have to go through security again on both legs.  We found seats for the layover duration, but no chance of a snooze as they were hard, upright, and in the midst of a ton of other travelers.  I had purchased a SIM card good for most all of Europe that would last us to just the end of the trip, so I spent part of our wait reading the instructions, swapping out my Verizon SIM, and activating the new one.  I wasn't any too sure I understood the directions, but it seemed to work, so we were good to go.  We were going to use What'sApp to communicate with John & Meghan, which turned out to work very well.  

The flight over was only 40 minutes, most of that circling, and we grogged our way through customs and baggage claim and got a taxi ($60!!) to our apartment in Amsterdam where we would connect with the family.  We would be at Marnixstraat 360, a third floor (they call it 2nd) walkup with very narrow stairs.  Arrow points to our balcony.

Our bedroom was in front, with a view of the street, streetlights, and trolley lines below.  Also within hearing distance of the street and trolley lines below.

The apartment was large, with a nice kitchen and bedrooms at the back for the family.  While certainly adequate, the furnishings were somewhat spartan and tired.  I made good use of my sleep mask and earplugs, as Amsterdam doesn't sleep on my schedule.  It was quite nicely located, in the middle of the range of things we wanted to see, so it worked out well.  No fun hauling our bozo suitcase up those stairs, though.

Although running on fumes, we needed some food so we took off walking to find a restaurant for a light dinner.  We found a good one, and the girls even got to self-scoop some ice cream from the proprietor's supply.  Whew!!  this long day was finally at an end.