Week 99: Easter in Amsterdam

Another busy week has flown by! The kids jumped back into school on Monday. Brooklyn’s softball practices started again and at her request, she started taking piano lessons again. We found the most amazing teacher, who is also an opera singer (another of Brooklyn’s passions- yes, really) and we think this is going to be a great experience for her.

The kids had off school Friday through Monday and we originally had planned a trip to Amsterdam to see the tulips. Brooklyn had a game scheduled for Saturday so we changed around our plans a little bit and ended up leaving for the Netherlands after the game was over.

Saturday, we headed to Kaiserslautern to catch Brooklyn’s two games. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we ended up having to drive two cars to Kaiserslautern, and decided to leave one of them on the Air Base over the weekend while we went to Amsterdam. The other team was really good and won both games, but we saw so much improvement from the Stuttgart team since their last time out. The games went pretty late and by the time we got my car parked in long term parking and got on the road to Amsterdam, it was almost 4pm.

We stopped in the city of Bonn on the way. Bonn is notable because it was the capital of West Germany during the Cold War and the division of Germany. We were stopping in though because we were trying to see their famous cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, it looked like we missed peak bloom by a just a couple of days. There were still some blossoms, but most had fallen to the ground. We will have to try again another year.

We made it to Amsterdam by 9pm. We stayed at the Residence Inn Houthavens. This is a new area of Amsterdam that was previously dockyards, but has been “re-generated” into modern housing, offices, and hotels. It is about a 15 minute bus ride to central Amsterdam so I was hesitant to stay here, but it ended up being awesome. The hotel itself is a Moxy and a Residence Inn, with the lower floors being Moxy branded and the upper floors being Residence Inn apartments. So, while we stayed in the Residence part, and had an apartment and got the free breakfast and laundry facilities, we also had access to the Moxy lobby where they had a bar, restaurant, and tons of games like chess and pool to play. It really was the best of both worlds and the distance from central Amsterdam didn’t end up being an issue at all. We all loved watching the ships coming and going in the harbor.

Sunday morning, we got up early and drove to the city of Haarlem to rent bikes. The bike route from Haarlem to Keukenhof Gardens is one I had done before with friends and could not wait to do with my family. Matt has been working hard at physical therapy just so he could be back on a bike in time for this trek. We had no issues getting the bikes and making the almost 20 kilometer ride to Keukenhof.

Sadly, while we were too late for the cherry blossoms, we were about a week too early to see a lot of tulips. We still enjoyed the daffodils, crocus, and hyacinth that were in full bloom along the route and smelled so good! The route that we took to the gardens was also different from the one I had done a few years earlier so it was nice to see areas and fields I hadn’t seen before.

When we arrived at Keukenhof, of course it was a crazy madhouse. Tens of thousands of grannies were clogging up every sidewalk and display, taking pictures on iPads. It was like this the time I came before. I consider Keukenhof to be one of those things “you have to do” but definitely don’t want to repeat. The flower displays were nice, although again, a lot of the tulips were not blooming. It does require a lot of patience just to walk through the park. We did run into some of our friends from Stuttgart there so that was cool.

We got started on our bike ride back to Haarlem and were really rushing because we thought the parking timer on our car would expire. Poor Ryan took a bad tumble over the handle bars in our rush and hurt his wrist pretty badly. He was unable to use it for most of the trip back and at the time, we were worried about it being broken. By the time we did get back to the bike shop though, he had full use of it again and said it didn’t hurt anymore, thank goodness! I don’t think I can take any more serious injuries in our family. We had Easter Dinner at a pub in Haarlem and then headed back to the hotel for some board games in the lobby.

On Monday, we headed into central Amsterdam. We took the bus right to the central station and then did a lot of walking around in the city. One thing I did not realize on my last trip, was that businesses open late on Mondays- like a noon. I think this is such a great idea. Why can’t the whole world have a delayed start on Monday mornings? It would make getting back into the work week so much easier. It did not affect anything we wanted to do as we were sticking to the touristy stuff. We saw Kalverstraat, Amsterdam’s pedestrian shopping street, Dam Square and the Royal Palace, and the floating flower market. At the floating flower market, we bought lots of flower bulbs for planting next year, and the kids got churros and Belgian waffles for snacks.

Then we did a lot of walking around the Jordaan neighborhood, which is the Amsterdam that everyone sees in postcards.

By lunch time, we had been walking a lot so we hopped on a canal cruise, which gave us a chance to see Amsterdam from another perspective, while not having to walk.

After our cruise, we rushed over to a bike shop to join a biking tour. The bike tour took us all over the city and we got to see lots of places we would not have been able to, had we been relying on our on two feet. Vondelpark and Museum Square are not very centrally located and we wouldn’t have made it to them otherwise. About an hour into the bike tour, it starting to rain heavily. Luckily, we had packed ponchos, but that did not keep our knees and shoes from getting soaked. Despite the rain, we biked about twenty more kilometers that day and had a blast. Ryan did crash in to another biker, but luckily both were ok.

After our soaking bike tour, we were starving so we went to a sushi restaurant I had went to on a previous visit called Sumo. We decided to do the All-You-Can eat option. There are six rounds and using a tablet to order, each person can choose up to 5 options each round, for a total of 30 dishes. Each dish is only one or two pieces, so sounded reasonable. We all started out ordering the full 5 items per round. The food was so good and none of us could stop talking about how good the food was, and how much we liked the restaurant. But as we got to Round 3, we started to get full really fast. I looked at the menu again to see if we could take anything home that we didn’t finish. Of course, you could not. But not only that, the last sentence that I failed to read at the beginning said, “We hate food waste, so any dishes uneaten will have a charge of 2 euros.” At this point, we had about ten un-eaten dishes on the table and more coming. We stopped ordering food immediately and started force feeding ourselves as much as possible, which drastically decreased our enjoyment of the experience LOL. To make matters worse, the All-You-Can-Eat option is timed and after two hours our time would run out. We finished enough food, just in time and luckily, we were not charged anything for food waste, but we left very uncomfortably full. It was certainly comical, but also very eye-opening: we definitely went in with a wasteful attitude without even realizing it.

The last stop of the day was the Anne Frank House. We had tickets for a 6:45pm entry and just barely made it. We toured the house and museum, which is very moving, and then headed back to the hotel around 8pm.

Tuesday, we packed up and started the drive home. Of course, since we were on the way home, the weather was gorgeous. That’s just how things go, I guess. We decided to make one last stop at Kinderdijk, a town about an hour west of Amsterdam. Kinderdijk is a UNESCO World Heritage Site thanks to its 19 wooden windmills that have been pumping water out of the low lying land for about 300 years.

We enjoyed a short walk around the site and some pottery shopping- Kinderdijk is really close to Delft and we were able to get some of the iconic blue and white pottery. Afterwards, we started the race back to Stuttgart, which was about a seven hour drive away. We needed to be back in the home area by 6pm in order to get the dogs from the kennel. Our GPS took us on a round-about journey through Belgium. Then, we had to go back to the Air Base to get my car, so needless to say, we didn’t make it back in time. Luckily, the kennel let us off the hook this time and we did get to see a new part of Belgium so it was all good!

This was my second trip to the Netherlands and the first for Matt and the kids. We all loved it so much. The Netherlands is SO CLEAN. On top of being clean, everything looks so well maintained and picturesque. We’ve been in Germany long enough that we have stopped noticing the graffiti everywhere. BUT, we definitely noticed the lack of graffiti in the Netherlands. We were enthralled driving down the freeway and seeing untouched and blank freeway walls and overpass pylons. Its also so flat, has great biking infrastructure, and the people are so nice. Its very similar to Denmark, but just a tad bit warmer. We all said we could see ourselves living there one day… who knows? We do know that we are definitely planning a summer trip back to do more biking and see more of the countryside.