Don MillerI started off my Europe trip here in Amsterdam because I have some long lost friends here and wanted to catch up. They have two nearly grown sons since I first met them on a Zanzibar beach a long time ago.
I always promised that whenever I was in the neighborhood, I would drop in. Let’s face it, whenever you’re in Europe, you’re in the neighborhood. My easiest flight to Europe along with my planned-ish itinerary was to start off in Amsterdam.
It was an all night flight with a bounce at Heathrow that went smoothly. My plan was to get some good sleep and see if I could beat the jet lag in flight. The only problem was the seat back movies had some movies that I haven’t seen. To be honest, I haven’t seen any moviesso I was up all night catching up. By the time I got to Amsterdam, I was eager for some sleep.
I still had it in my mind (what there was left of it) to get on the local schedule. I got to the train station around 2 PM and my hotel what turns out was on the other side of town by about 3 miles. I figured that I would walk to it just in time for dinner and a quiet evening
It was a quiet evening but not relaxing. Without my 24lb pack, I was feeling pretty light so went out for a little stroll and some dinner. But I just couldn’t get my appetite focused and ended up just eating a couple of slices of Pizzas that had been sitting under the heat lamp too long with 8 more miles logged. Definitely ready for sleep though.
The plan for the next days was for me to meet up with Claudio and Bo after they got out of work the next day and they took me up to their house in Edam. Claudio has been working to convert an old Dairy barn into a home for the past 10 years. They have the guest quarters completely done so after dinner and a long catch-up session I was 8 miles later, I was happy to crawl into bed. Hoping this was the night that I would back on a proper sleep schedule.
While I waited to meet up with Claudio and Bo the next day, I walked another 10 miles. Just walked, no Museums or anything. Didn’t stop off in the Pot shops although I could smell them pretty clearly. Shoot, the prostitutes didn’t even try to coax me in to one of their little window rooms in the red light district. I dodged a lot of bike riders too.
They are serious riders here, except they ride old bikes (since they’ll get stolen 
anyway) don’t wear helmets and spandex is replaced by tight skinny jeans. While pedaling at a pretty good speed, they dodge cars, trucks, scooters and clueless pedestrians (like myself) while texting, wearing head phones and carrying on telephone conversations
During my walk, I found a Wi-Fi signal and decided to take a rest and figure out my next stop. I decided that a flight to Oslo would be a good place to start so I wouldn’t have to backtrack from Copenhagen. I set up a flight on a small travel website much like Expedia, but definitely not. I booked a cheap flight and got the confirmation. It was in Dutch for some reason and I don’t speak Dutch. There was two pages of dutch and reservation numbers. Except for the strange train looking Icon for the first leg of the trip to the Brussels airport, so I was satisfied and went off to Edam.
Like I said, It was a nice evening and Claudio did confirm the icon meant that I was on a train to Brussels and then would transfer to the airport. It would be easy. I headed back to Amsterdam the next morning, so I had time to figure out all of my logistics for the next days travel and be close to town so I wouldn’t have to get up so early.
Another few miles of walking but not crazy like the previous couple of days. I stuck to the little neighborhood outside of the canal zone near the hotel. Plenty to do there and still get to bed early.
Travel Day. I was up early and at the airport with no problems. Plenty of time to get the train ticket and be on my way. Except there was no train ticket. I had to download Skype and get it configured to call customer service in Spain somewhere. Here, amongst all those Dutch words was a note that I needed to confirm the confirmation with the credit card again. I could have sworn that I gave them my card the first time. But since I hadn’t reconfirmed, There was no train and no flight and No Oslo that day.
I got on the free airport Wi-Fi and got a room near the airport. There is a small town a couple of miles away so I walked over there for dinner. Otherwise it was the McDonalds in the parking lot. A quiet town called Hoofdorp. Nice little suburb but smelled like a cow farm.
I got up really early the next morning and headed over to the airport again. This time my flight was showing as cancelled and I couldn’t find the airline counter to ask what was up. Another hour on skype with the ticket broker. His records won’t showing the flight cancelled and I was standing 3 feet from the departure board and it was plainly stating, in English, “cancelled”.
A guy was walking by and overheard the conversation and happened to be on the same cancelled flight and offered to join forces. He was able to get a hold of someone and knew where to look for the counter where the airline was set up. We talked to the lady who confirmed that the flight was not cancelled but just had a new flight number. We rushed over to another counter to get our boarding passes then through security to the gate with 5 minutes to spare. But the 5 minutes came and went and there as no gate agent or any other passengers waiting either. They changed gates in the 20 minutes between getting our boarding passes and our getting to the gate listed on the boarding pass. We ran over to the right gate and an hour later I am in Hamburg on my way to Oslo.
So in short, My mistake was not learning dutch before I came here. As the song goes, you get three mistakes. Lets hope I don’t use them all.
BTW, I take pictures in Raw Format so they are huge and need processing before I can load them on to the web. It is best to watch my Instagram Account because those get compressed automatically. The account name is TWDonmiller.
