Italy, September 2018 (Part 1 - Detour in Amsterdam)

When planing our next trip, Audrey and I had a short list of places we wanted to go: Beijing, Rome, Tokyo, Madrid, and London.

Although my heart was personally set on Beijing, Audrey’s sister, Emily, had just begun attending John Cabot University in Rome during the fall semester of 2018.

We broke our norm of flying out to Europe in the very early morning with a 7 PM flight to Amsterdam on a KLM flight operated by Delta.

Flying at night actually helped make the day of our flight relatively stress free. Typically I’m too anxious to sleep the night before an early flight due to fears of sleeping in. Taking a later flight allowed Audrey and I to sleep in, take the dogs to the PetsHotel when convenient, and we were able to run a few last minute errands.

I have to be honest, having had a terrible experience with Delta in the past made me very nervous flying with them this time but I have to say, Delta’s customer service is top notch and we had several instances where Delta representatives went above and beyond to help make our trip and enjoyable as possible.

Six hours later and we landed in Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport a little before 8 AM. We had a near seven-hour layover in Amsterdam and had previously decided to leave the airport for a few hours to go see the sights. Audrey was suffering from a really bad migraine and the passport control line was painfully slow.

I asked one of the airport attendants controlling the line if anyone had any tylenol or aspirin for her. Unexpectedly, the friendly attendant led us to the front of the line of passport control so we could go to a pharmacy located a short walk from customs.

For a little over 8€ a person, we were able to take a 15 minute train from the airport into the heart of the city. I am always amazed by Europe’s public transportation system but in Amsterdam I was more impressed by how many bicycles there were.

In fact, according to a report, there are currently more bicycles than there are people. It’s becoming such a problem that the local government is having to create solutions to combat traffic congestion created by the number of bikes.

Amsterdam is a weird place, and I say that in the nicest way possible. Austin, Texas likes to consider itself “weird,” but it pales in comparison to Amsterdam. A short walk from Amsterdam Centraal train station, there are numerous tourist spots that highlight the crazy amalgamation that is the city of bikes; a three minute walk will take you to Amsterdam’s Sex Museum, 11 minutes will land you at the steps of the city’s royal palace, 20 minutes will take you to the Anne Frank house, and 30 minutes will take you to the Van Gogh museum. It’s even faster if you rent a bike.

We stopped at a coffee shop because I wanted some…coffee…and we strolled through the city taking in the sights. For some reason I got really hungry so we stopped at Café Kobalt to get a quick breakfast.

Unfortunately, although a seven-hour layover sounds like a lot, by the time we actually got into the city and by the time we had to start heading back to the airport, we really only had three hours to look around, and we were there so early in the day that most things had not opened yet.

By the time we made it back to the airport around 12:30, exhaustion was kicking in and Audrey and I were both falling asleep in our chairs as we waited for the plane to Rome. A two hour hop on a plane and we were finally in Rome. We grabbed our luggage and took the train from the airport to Rome’s Termini train station in the heart of the city and took a short 10-minute walk to our hotel where we immediately went to sleep for the rest of the night.