6-18-04

Greetings from Amster-amster-DAM-DAM-DAM! There’s an old Boy Scout song that has that line, I couldn’t resist. J Tom asked me to write a journal entry since everyone likes my Christmas card addenda, so I am happy to oblige.

It is only fitting that we who joined Tom, Dianne, and Andrew on the beginning of their marvelous journey be present for the end of it. It’s been a great ten months for them. Although Tom and Dianne have traveled the world, this is still the experience of the lifetime. I’m sure Andrew formed some wonderful memories as well.

Props to John Woggon for maintaining this web site, I hope that it will stay up and that he will agree to chronicle their future adventures. (Not a chance.... JW comment)

Debbie and the kids flew out last Thursday and spent a couple of days in London, one of my favorite cities. They saw many cool things, such as the Tower of London, Big Ben, and the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. They then flew to Amsterdam and met the Diblings in a resort two hours north of there.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough accumulated vacation time (my company just went to a paid-time-off plan) to spend that leg of the voyage with them. I flew out from Houston on Wednesday, June 16th. The flight from Houston to London is 8 ½ hours. I took a sleeping pill but it didn’t affect me, the pill was pretty old, so that may have been the problem.

The flight had nice food, there was a choice of pasta or some beef and gravy for the dinner entrée, with some au gratin potatoes and salad. Breakfast the next morning was a nice ham and cheese croissant and yogurt.

Each seat on the plane, I believe it was a 777, had its own LCD screen built into the headrest of the seat in front. The angle of the LCD was adjustable, which was a good thing since the guy in front of me jammed his seat all the way back so his head was practically in my lap. One of the guys at work absolutely hated the movie “Mystic River”, so when I found it was one of the choices offered for the in-flight movie, I naturally had to see it. It really wasn’t that bad. It was a pretty straightforward murder mystery. I figure that when Clint Eastwood found he only had one hour of movie, he bolted on a bunch more scenes to lengthen it. Clint should learn that a movie doesn’t have to be long to be good. Look at “Phone Booth”, for example.

After going through customs at Gatwick Airport, which took an hour, I waited for my connecting flight to Amsterdam. The connecting flight just took an hour and was on a smaller plane. They served BLTs and yogurt for lunch. Not bad, but I’m not a BLT guy, and vanilla yogurt isn’t my favorite.

Customs in Amsterdam just took a few minutes and was a very smooth process. Debbie and Dianne were waiting for me at the customs exit. The trip north to the resort is normally a two-hour drive, but took closer to three due to traffic.

I was dropped off at the airport at 2:15 pm on Wednesday. Our final arrival at our destination was 7:00 pm Thursday. That was a pretty dang long time. Seven hours of that time was waiting at airports. Thank you, Osama. I was feeling pretty jetlagged so I went to bed early.

Today is Friday the 18th. We drove down from Exloo or some other unpronounceable name to Zevenhuizen or something like that. It was a two or so hour drive. We saw some windmills but not the wooden stuff you would expect. They have these great big metal poles maybe 100 feet high with three thin metal blades probably 40 feet long each. We also saw some of the old wooden windmills.

6-19-04

Today we drove into Amsterdam proper. Amsterdam is not a car-friendly city. There are bicycles everywhere and bike racks outside most buildings for people to lock their bikes to. Amsterdamers, or Amsterdamians, or Amsterdamites, or whatever the locals are called, ride their bikes with reckless abandon. None of them wear helmets and a good number carry another person on the bike. Some use cell phones. Some carry their babies.

The streets of downtown Amsterdam are like that of most old cities I have visited; narrow, winding, and labyrinthine. Most streets are one lane plus a bike lane. Some have center lanes for buses, taxis, and trolleys. We were driving in two cars since there are seven of us. The driving was a big source of stress for Debbie and for Tom, who were doing the driving. They wanted sixty euros to put another driver on the insurance, and Tom said fuhgedaboutit.

Today we visited two of the major landmarks of Amsterdam; the Van Gogh museum and the Anne Frank museum. The Van Gogh museum was awesome. There were many original Van Gogh paintings there, including “Sunflowers”, “The Potato Eaters” and several of his self portraits. There are three distinct phases to his painting. The first is his “Dutch” period when he lived in Holland until 1885, where his work is characterized by very dark colors and more accurate portrayals of his subjects. The second period, the “Paris” period, lasted until 1889 or so and is when Van Gogh mastered the use of stripe-like brush strokes in different colors that are close together. I call the final stage his “Wacko” stage, when he was in and out of mental institutions. Van Gogh goes beyond impressionism to abstraction in some of the last pictures, “Tree Roots” especially.

We ate lunch at a nice Thai restaurant. We wanted to eat Indonesian food, Indonesia once being a Dutch possession. Ethnic foods usually are very good in the country that formerly owned them or that they once owned. I’ve had great Indian food in the U.K., for example, and the best Mexican food outside of Mexico can be found in Texas and California. The food was good but the service was poor. Tom was pretty upset, I hope he didn’t stiff the waiter.

After lunch we went to the Anne Frank Museum. It had some of the original manuscripts of Anne’s diary. But it didn’t answer the essential question I’ve had about Anne, which is, did Anne do it with Peter? Regardless of who did it with whom, the museum definitely fulfilled its purpose in me, to tell the Holocaust story through the words of one girl. Other than the manuscript, there weren’t that many exhibits. The museum itself was an exhibit with its cramped rooms and tight staircases. Anne’s room was still decorated with her own original material.