Happy Wanderer: Netherlands & Belgium 2022

10 October 2022

Netherlands & Belgium 2022 - Day 1 / Amsterdam

Steps today : 27 235 / 17.58km

And so it beings! A new vacation... yippeeee!!!

I decided I am done with "Blogging on the road". It takes to much time at the end of the day, it feels redundant after a long day of Facebook ~~spam~~ posts, and most of all I got sick and tired of schlepping the laptop! This means my daily updates will be longer in coming, but I'm doing all this more for posterity than anything else, so I feel no sense of urgency to get it done.

Our arrival and processing through Schiphol was bizarrely fast; it took only about 90 minutes between the time the the wheels of the plane touched down on the tarmac to arriving at the hotel (using public transportation)

Why so fast? part of the reason was that we had no checked luggage, but also there was no line ups at customs / border control... like NONE! a big empty room, and maybe 10 people. Where were all the people? They couldn't all be in transit or waiting for their luggage - it made no sense.

I have a theory: to get to the border control, at one point you need to descend a set of stairs that look like you're heading off into a basement, I remembered this from previous arrivals at Schiphol. This time, that staircase wasn't very well illuminated, so it was REALLY not obvious that it was the way to go. Could all the other people have taken a different, longer, more illuminated route? No idea - but yay for us!

This was my 4th visit to Amsterdam, and I remember that hotels are quite expensive compared to other cities. In fact, on my trip in spring of 2018 we stayed over in Haarlem instead of Amsterdam to save money. Staying in the city center is out of my budget, so this time, we stayed north of the IJ River at a big boxy Holiday Inn and it was just fine. We are walkers, so the location did not discourage us - getting to the city meant a good 15 minute walk to the ferry dock, and the FREE ferry was the easiest thing ever. During the week we never waited more than 5 minutes and we zipped across the river to the Central Station in no time. Easy peazy... unless you hate walking or have limited mobility. This image shows how the ferry wasn't busy, but in general that wasn't our experience. It was usually much much more crowded.

This shows the scenic route along the water from the ferry dock to the hotel, the more direct route would shave off about 5 minutes.

At 9AM when we arrived, predictably the room wasn't ready so we left our bags and went off to explore the city.

We wandered around in the drizzle but didn't take that many pictures since it was so grey.

Royal Palace:

Beetle Sphere:

We had a small snack along the way to hold us over and finally settled in for lunch at the American Bar which I remembered from previous vacations. The décor was better than the food; I really didn't enjoy my salad.

After this, the sun was out and it was off to find some interesting sites I had marked as to see on my map of things to do.

The Little Woodcutter, which I had to sneak around a police "do not cross" barrier to get a picture - I got caught so no time for close-ups!

Zevenlandenhuizen - Built in 1894, it's a row of 7 houses that reflect German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, English and Dutch house designs

Here are the Russian and Spanish ones:

Vondelpark - finally made it after 4 trips to Amsterdam!

And finally Lomanstraat which is famous for it's tilty trees. Click here for more Google Images

It was 2:30 by then and we were clear across town so time to start heading back.

I needed a pee break and stopped at Public Washroom near the Rijksmuseum where I got a good laugh out of the sign....

I am sure many people make a wrong turn here, in fact after I left the men's section realizing I had followed the wrong symbol, I ran into a man leaving the woman's section!

We had stopped by the Rijksmuseum because I wanted to get a picture of the flowers in the pond behind the building, but no luck, it was drained and being worked on so we kept going looking for a place to stop and fuel up again.

Passed an interesting art installation along the way:

Ahhh.... Espresso Martinis!

Along the way back to the ferry, we stopped at the Beurspassage so I could get a better picture of "The Fish". The colouring of the last one I took in 2018 was way too yellow!

We got back at the hotel by about 5, to check into the room and unpack. Nice room, comfortable enough. I had a choice between 2 twin beds or 1 double bed, but my husband and I are used to a King so a double bed would have been too uncomfortable for a week. I opted for 2 twins hoping they would be pushed together to make a fake king - but no luck. Still, we slept well on most nights... except on two occasions we were kept awake until about midnight because of loud music, to the point where I wondered if there was a nightclub in the area!