THE TIME/SPACE CONTINUUM

I’ve seen travel guides that tell you it’s possible to do a trip on X amount of dollars per day.  Is there equivalent advice on how to do – let’s say a city like Amsterdam – on X amount of sleep hours per day?  This is not about a lack of things to see or do.  Like any world renown city Amsterdam offers beauty and history and culture in endless supply.  You could literally sightsee 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  The trick is to be conscious and aware while you’re doing it.  For that to happen a person requires sleep.  That’s the tricky part.

Day one of our adventure began at 5:00 because we live three hours from the airport and we are catching an international flight which requires travellers be there three hours before takeoff.  That’s six hours of up-and-at’em before liftoff.  The extra hours are to give you time to trouble shoot the fallout of snow storms in other provinces (see previous post).  I don’t begrudge them as much as I used to.

If you’re lucky (and we were very lucky) there’s another plane that will take you east instead of west and still get you where you want to go so that ten or so hours later it’s 8:30 in the morning the next day when you get there.  At best you managed two hours of fitful sleep on the plane, it is midnight in the time zone you woke up in, and you have all of Holiday Day # 1 ahead of you on an empty tank.  Welcome to jet lag.

As I mentioned before, travel agents are invaluable and we were lucky enough to have one in our group.  Our baby sister always bemoans how she missed out on the green thumb gene but she makes up for it with her detailed planner DNA.  From the moment we booked this trip she stepped up with research on where, when, and how to get the most out of our dime.  The core of our adventure was a week long cruise down the Rhein River but we had two days in Amsterdam first and with her organizational skills we made every minute count.  She even put together a book so that she could stay on top of every element. 

She was the reason our airport to hotel shuttle wasn’t allowed to leave without us when our plane took extra long to park.  She had done the research into what was close to our hotel so we could explore on our own without fear of getting lost.  She was the one who booked the canal boat tour on our second night.  The only one of us she didn’t worry about was Sandy, come to join us from South Africa, saying that “She is a strong independent woman!”  That way she had more time to keep tabs on her older sisters whom she didn’t seem to have the same confidence in.

Day one we checked into our hotel, explored the immediate area, found a tulip market, watched furniture being delivered through a third story window, marvelled at the pretty buildings and trees leafing out, picturesquely mirrored in the canals, and found a restaurant that served Argentinian beef for our evening meal.  By 7:30 we called it a day, only to wake up a few hours later because it was wake up time at home.  The South African girl had it the easiest – she flew farther than we did but never left her time zone.

Day two was breakfast and then a walking tour; lots of history, cobble stones, photo ops, tipsy houses, trees in bloom, and our guide reminding us constantly to watch for bikes.  There are thousands of them and they have the right of way.  Also, they are every bit as deadly silent as the electric cars.  We all survived.  

After a quick street lunch of fish and chips we took a taxi to an open street market confident in the promise that our scheduled canal ride was only 12 minutes walk away.  That’s what Amy’s book said.  But, whether Google Maps let us down or minutes go faster in The Netherlands, we did not make that date on time.  We are pretty sure we saw our boat chugging away as we approached but it didn’t matter – we had missed it.

There’s no keeping that girl down though.  She worked her way through feelings of frustration and disappointment (in herself – she felt that she had let us down) but then came up swinging!  She would get our money back!  This led to being offered an after dark tour (After all, who needs sleep anyway?).  It was a cold, wet wait but our tour guide made it worth it so all was good in the end.

All that was left to do was to get to the river cruise ship the next morning.  There were a few hiccoughs … the transfer shuttle thought we would have the address of where were going.  We thought he would have it.  Amy’s book only had a very unhelpful phone number but GPS saved the day and finally we were aboard the Emerald Luna – Home Sweet Home for the next seven days. 

And shortly after that two of us were in a taxi headed back to the hotel for a wallet left in a safe.  If things happen in threes we sure hoped that the kerfuffles were all behind us.

This was night number three and I slept almost the whole night.