Meredith relies heavily on the Rick Steves brand of travel books to plan these vacations. I like using the internet, which allows me to occasionally go “OR,” or Off-Rick. One of the places I found in my searches that looked lovely was Giethoorn, a small village carved out of a peat swamp where the traditional center of the town remains largely unchanged – no motor traffic (other than five-mph boats on the many canals), and the center is now a protected World Heritage site. I really wanted to see it.

This created a problem; to get there by public transportation takes at least two hours each way, which is a long time for a day trip. It is around ninety minutes by car, which is about as far as I am willing to go for a single site in a day. So the obvious thing to do was to hire a local guide. I could have rented a car more cheaply, or even gotten an Uber for less money, but Mer and I have always enjoyed the guides we have hired on past trips. They are guides for a reason – they know things about the sites that are otherwise hard to pick up, or they know places not on the beaten paths, and they take care of the driving.

Enter Cherry, of Cherry’s Travel. Cherry is originally from Hong Kong, but has lived in the Netherlands for twelve years. She has lived all over the world, and loves travel. She put together a private tour for us, with her and a driver, on only about sixteen hours’ notice. I did not book things until Thursday, as I was keeping an eye on the weather, which was cool but sunny today. Cherry agreed to take us to Giethoorn, then to the all-in-one-all-things-Dutch village/site of Zaanse Schans, and finish off at the sort-of seaside town of Volendam. She said it would be a long day, but it would get us a Dutch highlights tour all in one day.

We got to Giethoorn around 10:30, and booked a canal boat tour for 11:30. We used the time in between to wander the village. The town has a public walking path because most of the houses are on small islands, and the paths and bridges to them are private. The path takes you past boat companies and restaurants, and to the church, where you can walk north or south. We went south, admiring the thatched-roof houses and the many many many bridges across the many many many canals – the town has over 150 bridges for just 2,600 residents. The canals, and the large lake next to the town, were all created by farming peat for fuel. As the peat was shallow, all the waterways (including the lake) are only about three feet deep.

Traveling off-season has challenges – not everything is open, and it can be cold (it was a high of forty-four today), but it has advantages too. We had the town largely to ourselves. While we saw five or six tourists on small boats in the canals, I do not remember seeing any obvious tourists on our walk, which was very peaceful and beautiful. When we got back for our boat tour, it ended up being a private tour – four of us and the pilot in a boat that can hold fifty people. It probably was not good for the boat company, but it was good for us. Other boats we saw while we were there had more people in them, but we had our own.

After the boat tour, which also went out on the lake, we grabbed a quick lunch, and then walked the northern part of the town. Again, we had it largely to ourselves, although we did run into a group of eight or so twenty-ish-year-old guys going into a restaurant, but I could not tell if they were tourists or locals. Giethoorn was a hit with us, and I would happily go back when it was warmer so I could spend more time wandering the town or renting an electric boat to take out on the lake.

Going to and coming from Giethoorn took us through a huge area of reclaimed land – the Dutch are really good at building dikes, and turned their Zuiderzee (South Sea) into a large freshwater lake by building a twenty-two-mile dike across the mouth to the Atlantic. Then they built more dikes to reclaim dry land from some of the lake. The land now sits below the lake level, as does much of the country – two thirds of the Netherlands is below sea level. Driving along and seeing the water within just a couple of feet of the top of the dike with towns below that level on the other side is eye-opening. Mer put it well when she said that the Netherlands looked to be one good rain away from flooding.

We drove back around Amsterdam and went north of the city, to the tourist-focused site/town of Zaanse Schans. It is a tourist trap, with five relocated and working windmills, a clog-making shop, a cheese-making shop, and a cute village where no one lives (they are shops), but the tourist area is surrounded by cute homes where people really do live, so the whole area is open to people to wander around in, and most stores give demonstrations for free so that they get potential customers into the store.

We got to see the five windmills, although not so closely as I would normally like, as we were a little pressed for time. We got to see an excellent clog-making demonstration by a man with flawless English, who then did the entire demonstration in Chinese for the group after us. It used to take two or three hours to carve a wooden shoe, whereas the “new” (eighty-year-old) machines he demonstrated could make a shoe in five minutes. Why wooden shoes? They last a long time and are waterproof, which is important in a country where water is everywhere.

We went on to a just-us cheese-making demonstration given by a cheerful young woman. She explained that their young cheese was about a month old, and old cheese was aged one or even two years. We wandered the shop and then out into the old village area, before getting in the car to go to Volendam.

I keep wanting to call Volendam a seaside town, but it technically is not one anymore. It was on the sea until the early twentieth century, when the sea dike was built. Now, Volendam is on a huge lake, but still looks like a seaside town. In fact, it reminded both Mer and me of Rockland, Maine, where Mer’s grandfather lived. In Voldendam, we walked along the cute street facing the lake and got a private demonstration of how to make stroopwafels, with Meredith assisting in the process. Stroopwafels are a Dutch dessert for which very thin waffles are cut in half and filled with caramel, and then put back together. They are delicious. It turns out the fresh, warm versions are drool-worthy. Mer and I picked up chocolate-covered stroopwafels and ate them looking out at the lake.

We finished walking the main street and then hustled back to the car to get out of the gusting wind, which was now very cold with the sun’s going down. We rode back into town, getting home about 5:30.

I thought that was to be the end of the touring day. Since we had eaten late, we headed out around 7:00 to get light fare from a local supermarket. However, when we were halfway to the market, my eye was caught by a woman playing a piano in a restaurant, so we crossed the street to look at the menu. It turned out to be an Argentinian eatery, so it was mostly grilled meats. We decided were were all okay with that, and we went in for what turned out to be our favorite meal of the week. If you are ever in Amsterdam, check out La Casona near the Prinsengracht canal. Our meal was a fitting celebratory end to an excellent week in Amsterdam and environs.

I loved this trip. The city is beautiful, with the old buildings and all the canals. The museums are top-notch. Getting lost is easy, but you don’t really mind in a city like this. The people with whom we interacted were all friendly, and many were outright charming. We squeezed in a visit to a castle and a canal-rich village. We saw heroic World War II sites and got to The Hague, remarkable for at least having an article in its name.

Lord willing, we’ll be back. When it is warmer. These Thanksgiving trips, if they continue, need to look south.

Dubbs was in charge today, and decided to let all of us sleep in, even if she woke up at her usual 3:00 am. Mer and I were allowed to lounge in until 9:00. Dubbs had one touring goal – to get to the Christmas fair being held at the De Haar Castle in Vleuten, near Utrecht.

That sounds like a modest goal, but it involved some planning. We walked to a nearby Metro stop, took it to the Amstel station (our third major Amsterdam train station this trip!), took a train to the Utrecht station, took a train to the Vleuten train station, and then finally got on a shuttle bus to take us to the castle. What could go wrong? Well, you could get on an express from Utrecht to Gouda, zipping right by Vleuten, which would probably require a return trip back to Utrecht before catching the right train. And you probably could get stuck on the station side of a Metro exit barrier because your card time had expired, with no way to buy another ticket, which might make you dash through the gates after someone else had gone through. That possibly could go wrong.

But we did make it to the De Haar Castle around 1:00 in the afternoon, where we bought our admission into the two-hundred-plus-booth Christmas fair on the grounds of the beautiful castle that the De Haar family refurbished in the late 1800s as a summer home and entertaining center. They rubbed elbows with the rich and famous of the twentieth century, including Gregory Peck and Brigitte Bardot. The castle is beautiful, surrounded by moats and canals and gardens and walls. The structure is made of red brick, and was designed by the same architect who did the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam’s central train station. The woodwork of the main hall ceiling is stunning, and the walls are filled with stained glass. It is an elegant home, even if it was only used for about a month per year.

We paid to tour the castle, and paid the slight extra to tour the servants’ hallways and quarters, so we have now done the “nooks and crannies” tour of the De Haar Castle, but still have not managed it at Stan Hywet in Akron. It was interesting to see how there were hidden corridors for the staff to use so as to stay out of sight of the guests. We also read that it was not unusual for staff to work seventeen-hour days, but that the De Haar family treated their help well, providing clean and modern rooms for them to live in, and the information we read said the staff often remained loyal to the family their whole lives.

The tour was fun, with the only downside being that it was given in Dutch. We had English cards telling us what we were seeing, but it sounded as if our guide, an older man, was quite funny. It was the first time this whole week that we were surrounded by Dutch who spoke little or no English.

The fair itself was good – the number of booths was dizzying. I’m not sure we actually saw them all. We stopped in at the “Moulin Rouge” tent to hear some live music (two Dutch women singing Carpenters songs in English), before finding a good food tent. Dubbs shopped for a few gifts, including a new scarf for herself, and that was the afternoon. We left the fair around 5:30, when it was mostly dark, so we got to see all the Christmas lights come on around the tents of the fair.

We got back home around 6:15 and headed out to supper a little after 7:00. It was in a very cute pedestrian-(and bike, of course)-only area. After having Italian food in Lisbon last Thanksgiving, we decided on Mexican in Amsterdam this year. After supper and dessert, we walked a mile or so back home, admiring the canals and looking into the upper windows of lovely Amsterdam homes. So starts our Christmas season. Here is hoping Santa brings us some unexpired Metro cards.

Sadly for blogging purposes, there were no thong-wearing or shirtless men seen on the breakfast run today, but as I was waiting for my bagels, a super-handsome man came in, with dark, curly hair, a dark long coat, and a dark scarf. Dubbs said she will be getting the bagels from now on.

Dubbs was in charge of things today, so that meant three things – museums, museums, and museums. She loves art. So off we went back to the Rijksmuseum, since we had only seen a very small part of it. We got there just after the museum opened at 9:00, and we had each room almost to ourselves (even the one containing The Night Watch). It only started filling up, largely with school children, at 9:45 or 10:00. Dubbs wanted to see the nineteenth-century paintings and then see all the Rembrandts in the museum. Sadly, a painting she really wanted to see, The Milkmaid, is on loan to a museum in  Tokyo currently. It took me much longer than it should have to realize that the Dutch national art museum would be almost all Dutch artists. Ooops. I tended to like the unusually lit paintings (sunsets, cloudy days, moonlit scenes), especially if they had water in them. Mer liked the ones with bare trees.

We spent about two hours in the Rijksmuseum and then took the Metro to Amsterdam’s southern train station, where we caught a train to The Hague, about fifty minutes away. When we did get there, we discovered that the train station was surrounded by “buildings of the future”-feeling buildings, with curved surfaces and shining metal, and some really seemed to be made of plastic. They all made getting out of the train station confusing, but we finally found our way out.

We grabbed lunch in a small shopping street, and then made our way to the main square near the parliament building, which was next to the beautiful Mauritshuis Museum. The museum was in a former mansion, so it was a living space. What that means was that the art hung in large, but human-sized, rooms, which made it much more intimate. There were only about fifteen paintings or even fewer hanging in each room, and there were only sixteen rooms on two floors. Seeing this museum was really easy, and the views out many of the windows were across a pond into a park ringed with cute buildings. This was definitely one of my favorite museum buildings.

Since the Dutch Golden Age (the seventeenth century) produced lots of wealthy people, Dutch painting has a lot of portraits – the rich liked getting their own picture painted. As such, there were a lot of portraits in the museum, but the most famous one, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, is a tronie – a made-up portrait. She never really existed, but she is plastered on everything in gift shops around Amsterdam (and certainly in the museum in The Hague).

One of the things that caught my eye was the flexibility Rembrandt displayed – he could create paintings of great detail, and then he could paint ones where the backgrounds were just suggested shapes, or the subject was painted with broad stokes and blurry lines. Some of his paintings seemed to me to anticipate the Impressionist movement about two hundred years before it actually happened.

We saw the entire museum, including a special exhibit on Dutch paintings found in great English houses (the English really liked Dutch paintings), in under two hours. We walked back to the train station and got back home around 6:30. I was not feeling totally well, probably as the result of caffeine from drinking too many Cokes over the last few days, so Mer and Dubbs went off to dinner without me, and took advantage of my picky absence by going to a Thai restaurant. When I was feeling a little better, I went to a supermarket and got salted nuts and fruit juices.

So it was not the best end of the day, but the day itself was quite fun. I wonder what Bagel Boy will turn up tomorrow morning?

I made a bagel run again this morning, and although I was not passed by any thong-wearing rollerbladers, I did get to see a really buff shirtless man standing in front of his huge window on the third floor. Dubbs has volunteered to get breakfast from now on.

This was another day when Mer was in charge, and we started off fairly early so we could get to the museum campus and the Van Gogh Museum at 9:00, for when our reservations were. There was a thirty-minute window, so our getting there at 9:30 was no issue. We decided to pick up an audioguide that walked us through the highlights of the collection, which took about an hour and a half, which was a perfect amount of time for us today.

The Van Gogh Museum was roughly organized chronologically, although they sometimes had grouped items (like self-portraits) for easier comparison. They’d also dedicated parts of each of the three floors to works by other artists who inspired Van Gogh. It was very useful to see, especially with the help of the audioguide, how Van Gogh’s style developed over time. Van Gogh tried to capture the emotion of a person or scene, and he did this by experimenting more and more with brush textures and using more and more bright colors. He also started using basic colors next to each other, instead of mixing the colors on his paint palette, which forces the viewer to mix the colors with the eye, creating color that is not really there.

Since the museum has hundreds of letters that Van Gogh wrote, it interwove his history with the history of his paintings, from working in his hometown, to moving to Paris and then to the south of France, to admitting himself into a mental hospital, to finally moving back north to be near his brother, before Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and died two days later. His brother, then his brother’s wife, and finally his nephew worked very hard to make sure that Van Gogh’s work became known, with the nephew’s being instrumental in getting the current museum to be founded and opened.

We all found it interesting and moving. The only downside was, even in off-season on a random Tuesday, the museum was fairly crowded, making viewing some of the paintings difficult.

We left the museum and actually took the fairly new Metro line to the train station, where we caught the train to the town of Haarlem, about twenty minutes away. Mer wanted to visit the house of Corrie Ten Boom, who, with her family, hid Jews during World War II, and later preached forgiveness and love through Jesus around the world. The museum really was her home, so the museum can only take twenty people at at time, in a first-come, first-served line outside the home. We got there two hours before the next English tour, and Mer was debating about if we should wait in line. Happily, since we were hungry and very, very cold in the wind and high-30s weather, she chose to risk the off-season line, and we went and ate.

When we got back from lunch, we still had forty minutes to wait, and there was no one in line. We queued up, and by the time we got admitted, it was still just the three of us (although a Canadian couple joined us thirty minutes into the one-hour tour). Our guide was a volunteer who had recently moved with her husband from South Africa. He was hired as a hockey coach, and she was asked at her new church to help out with the tours, and as she had been on the tour once before, she was eager to help out. She was very kind, and it was nice to have such a small group so we could interact with her.

I knew nothing of Corrie when I went in. She and her sister, both in their fifties, along with her father (in his eighties), were deeply devout Christians who had a long history of praying for the people of Israel. So when the Nazis started rounding up Jews, they wanted to help Jews escape the Netherlands. They would open their door to anyone who asked, and helped over eight hundred Jews escape. They had a false closet built at the back of Corrie’s room, accessed by a small sliding door. The entire structure was built of brick so that it would not sound hollow, and could hold up to eight people standing back-to-front, crammed in together.

One day, a man stopped by to ask for money to help his wife get out of jail; he said she had been helping Jews. Corrie told him to come back in the evening, and when her sister went to answer the door in the evening, she heard a car, which tipped her off that the Gestapo was coming (no one else had cars). She hit a hidden buzzer, and four Jews and two resistance fighters fled into the closet. The Germans raided the home, but could not find the hiding place, and so decided to wait out the Jews, waiting about two days while the people in hiding suffered with no light, food, water, or heat in February. The Germans got bored and turned the guarding over to the local police, and as there was one policeman who was sympathetic to the smuggling group, he got the Jews and two other men out and away.

Meanwhile, Corrie and her sister and father were arrested on charges of having too many ration cards. The Nazis offered to let the father go, since he was old, on the condition that he would stop helping Jews, but he refused. He was sent off to a prison camp, where he died ten days later.

The sisters were moved from a jail to a concentration camp north of Berlin once the Allies started closing in. Corrie’s sister remained positive and kept reminding Corrie to forgive. The sister died in the camp, but had two very specific visions of houses where centers of healing would be set up, and one was at the camp in which she died. Both visions were realized after the war, to the point where the owner of the one home was shocked as Corrie described it in minute detail, even though she had never seen it. Corrie went on to tour the world, preaching forgiveness, even to the point of writing to forgive the man who turned her family in. She kept touring most of her life, into her early eighties.

I was amazed at the story. Corrie and her family were giants of the Christian faith, and I had known nothing of them. I was grateful to tour the home.

Afterwards, we went to the town square to tour the cathedral of St. Bavo. It houses a five-thousand-pipe organ, and we were lucky enough to be in the church when someone was practicing for a concert. The acoustics were amazing, even to one of Mer’s little “meeps” sounding during a quiet spell. The cathedral is simple, but impressive, with an intricate wooden ceiling and a very modern stained glass window that was installed in 2015. The floor of the church is all tomb covers, and they are all worn away from foot traffic so that no names are visible anymore.

From church, we swung by a chocolate cafe to get warm (it really was bitterly cold) and then took the train back to Amsterdam. We grabbed a canal tour boat for a one-hour tour of the canals, captained by a funny man who was a skillful sailor, getting the boat into canals not designed for a boat so large. It was pretty to see Amsterdam lit up from the viewpoint of the canals – the houseboats and the canal-facing homes were all very pretty.

We started walking home, but got very cold and jumped into a restaurant to eat and get warm. Then Dubbs, who thinks of these phone-related things, summoned an Uber driver to get us within a few blocks of home, saving us from a cold walk.

It was a long day, and the weather was not always kind, but we saw a lot of worthwhile places today.

Amsterdam’s city symbol is three side-ways crossed, which look like the letter “X”. I was amusing myself with laughing about Amsterdam being “XXX,” or triple-X. Then it occurred to me that this might actually be where the term “triple-X” comes from – that Amsterdam has long been known for, shall we say, looser morals, and that this may have worked its way into English. This theory pleases me so much that I have not bothered to do the seventeen seconds of web research I would need to verify it. I like my idea even if it is not true.

Today was “my” day, and I wanted to take a bit of a touristic risk. We all like seeing cities, and we all like games, so I thought we were a perfect match for City Challenge – Amsterdam, an iPad-based game in which you run around the city solving puzzles and racking up points in an attempt to get the highest score for the month. It is not a timed game (for the most part), so it lets you have time for picture stops and lunch and such. It has a four-hour option of the game that takes you through most of the old center of the city, so if we finished it, we would have a good overview of the city (which is not the same thing as being able to navigate a city based on circular canals).

So we picked up our iPad around 11:00 after a pleasant thirty-minute walk from our house to the main shopping area near the train station, on the northern end of the city center. We started the mission just south of the station, which meant we would end the day back at the station.

The iPad games broke into a few categories. There were many stops where we had to answer multiple choice questions about Amsterdam; generally, we were taking wild guesses at these (we did not allow ourselves to use an iPhone for the answers). There were several stops where you had to look at a picture of the famous building in front of you and spot the differences between the real building and the edited picture. And then there were multiple major challenges, which were the most involved, but worth the most points.

These were generally fun. We had one for which we had to help friends find their lost friend before their flight left, based on the photos he had posted online. We had to run through the shopping district collecting letters from signs to spell a word out (the only game we failed at because the instructions were not clear to us how the counting of the signs was to be done). My favorite game had us solving which one of the men in the statue version of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch had killed the captain; we had to run around the area and collect four hints from virtual eyewitnesses while being chased by virtual henchmen. We had to match photos of parts of houses along three blocks to help the police find drug houses. We had to collect clues on how to defuse a bomb near the museums (I had to keep telling Dubbs not to say “bomb” so much around crowds and police). We had to help two lovers find each other in the Vondelpark. We had to help reboot the computer system at the train station based on timetables for trains. It was a blast.

And we actually learned some things about the city. We did not know that fifteen thousand bikes are dredged from the canals each year. We missed that the main shopping street was also the most expensive, with rents of three thousand euros per square meter.  (We thought it was a different shopping area with Armani and such that we had seen on Sunday). There are a little over a hundred kilometers (sixty miles) of canals in the city. The “Old Church” is the oldest building in the city, and the “New Church” burned down three times.

We saw most of the city, skipping the northwestern and the southeastern areas. While I had no desire to see the famous Red Light District, I knew there was a chance the game might take us into it, but I figured the “working girls” would not be working at 11:00 am on a Monday. I was wrong. I was looking at my iPad map when I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a curvaceous mannequin displaying lingerie. As I turned to make a snide comment to Meredith about her needing new clothing, the mannequin suddenly moved. I became very interested in my iPad, and our two-block tour of the District was quickly over.

The rest of the areas were quite lovely – the shopping district, in all of its holiday decor; lots of canals and lovely houses; the museum campuses; and the pleasant Vondelpark, where two nice ladies offered to help us when we were looking confusedly at the iPad. We explained we were playing a game and thanked them. I love the people here – they are incredibly nice.

We finished the “four hour” game in about six-and-a-half hours. We racked up over 45,000 points, but we will not get our official score and ranking via e-mail for about a day. The rankings hold the best scores for the last thirty days, and it looks as if we will fall into second place. Drat that letter-gathering game!

We had supper pretty much to ourselves in a restaurant next to the gaming place. It was great – two funny men running the restaurant, good food, and eighties pop music playing on the radio. We grabbed some dessert nearby and walked home. And walked. And walked. We ended up finding some new and pretty spots, but had to keep consulting the map and iPhone to get home.

So, between the game and the scenic stroll home, we set a new (for us) vacation walking record – 16 miles, or 31,000 steps. None of us was sad to get home, even if it was only 7:30. I think we will all sleep well tonight.

One of the reasons to travel is to see things you either can’t see or would rarely see at home. To wit, I ventured out to get us all breakfast this morning while Mer and Dubbs got ready. Normally, even in the metropolis of Cuyahoga Falls, I do not walk out the front door and get greeted by a canal. Add in mostly deserted streets (on a Sunday morning) and charming buildings and a beautiful day, and you have the makings of an astonishingly great walk. I saw some very cute children in life jackets getting bundled onto canal boats. All very European Normal Rockwell.

That is when I was passed by the rollerblading man. Since he came at me from behind (ha!), I did not get to see him from the front, but the backside was certainly in view. The man was wearing a hat, a coat, and a blue thong, and rollerblading. In thirty-six-degree weather. Even in relaxed Amsterdam, he was catching odd looks from the few people out and about.

Since many places are closed on a Sunday, I took a circuitous route to a bagel place we had seen on Saturday, to see if there was anywhere else open.  Along the way, I passed the Bag and Purse Museum, which I had not known existed. Then, I passed the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which was tastefully guarded by a large man in an impeccable suit, who I am sure would have politely refused me entrance.

I finally got to the bagel store, where I learned several things: food is expensive in Amsterdam, with bagels running over four dollars each; Europeans spread butter and jams using spoons instead of knives; nude men on magazine covers is considered good possible breakfast reading material. A man at a table was talking about how smells are all frequencies, and went on to expound how all of life is frequencies.

The walk home was uneventful. This was just getting breakfast, mind you.

Mer was in charge today, and she wanted to go to church, so we went to church. We may have had one or two or a dozen photo stops along the way. We still made it on time, to an English-speaking service of a Vineyard Church, housed in an old church that had been updated with sound and other A/V equipment, as well as an extensive coffee bar. The people seemed very kind, and it was a good service. We opened with the hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” sung in Dutch, but projected with English lyrics, and then the rest of the songs were all in English with Dutch lyrics projected. The sermon was all in Dutch, but we were provided with headsets to listen to a live English translation, which is always an impressive trick to me. The sermon was on the importance of giving – being willing to give up time and money to serve God, and how God is faithful even when you give. He used a few examples, but one that stuck out was of a friend who was a doctor who gave up what could have been a lucrative practice in the Netherlands to go practice medicine in rural China instead. The doctor is retired and has little money now, but is full of life and joy; he gave away himself and does not regret it at all.

After church, we strolled over to the Rijksmuseum, which is the national museum of the Netherlands. It is enormous. We got a museum pass card that we can use five times in any number of museums around the city, and we signed up for a “highlights tour” for 3:00. That gave us time to eat lunch in the cafe before joining the tour, which was only five of us joining a charming guide who took us on an hour tour of some of her favorite works, which included talking about the building.

The Rijksmuseum was built in the late 1800s as part of a nationalist movement in the newly-created Netherlands, so the building was designed to be a museum. The architect had experience in building cathedrals, and so many aspects of the museum resemble large church buildings, from stained glass to large entrance halls, to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch being in a place where an altar normally would be. In fact, the place was so much like a Catholic church that the Protestant king refused to dedicate the building and never set foot in it.

Our guide, Anne, showed us several paintings. One was a beach scene that seemed happy, but she asked us to look more closely and explained more about it, and it was of fisherman’s children who were “Children of the Sea” (the name of the piece), so it was not so cheerful as it may have looked at first. She showed us a painting of a street scene influenced by photography, with the rooflines of the buildings cut off. The central figure was of a woman who originally was a maid, but the painting did not sell, and the artist heeded the advice of some friends and repainted her as a fur-wearing rich woman. The painting then sold.

We went upstairs to the seventeenth-century room, where we saw a painting of a family party that was out of hand, with even the children smoking and drinking; it had a moral of (more or less) “as the parents do, so will the children.” It seems paintings like that sold very well. We saw an extraordinary still life, and while I am not fond of still life paintings, this one was almost photorealistic. The artist really was showing off, and for good reason.

We finished out tour with Rembrandt – his The Jewish Bride painting from late in his career, with a husband and wife holding hands, but I thought they looked slightly sad. Of course, we finished with the huge and magnificent The Night Watch, which was revolutionary for the time, with Rembrandt’s capturing motion and action instead of stiff poses. We were told the painting was cut back at one point because it did not fit where people wanted to hang it. No one knows where the lost portions went, but the museum has a painted miniature copy of the full canvas, so at least we know what it was supposed to look like.

That was a grand way to spend an hour, and I like art much better when someone helps me understand the history or symbolism of a painting. We will almost certainly be going back to the Rijksmuseum later in the week, but today we had a 5:00 reservation to see the Anne Frank Museum, which was about a thirty-minute walk away.

You need to have a reservation for the museum, which Meredith booked two months ago, because it is so small. The museum is mostly made up of the building where the Franks and four other people hid for two years before being discovered by the Nazis. That was the most striking thing for me – to see how small the rooms were where the people all had to live together for such a long time. Anne Frank wrote a diary during her time in hiding, and after the war it was published by her father, who was the only person of the eight to survive the concentration camps to which they were all sent.

The presentation of the museum was excellent. We had audio guides that were room-activated, and so would tell us the history of the Frank family and the people who helped them hide. The actual rooms where the Franks and the others lived had no audio guide descriptions, probably to keep people moving through the small spaces. They still had the marks in the wall that recorded Anne’s and her sister’s heights, and still had Anne’s decorations pasted to the walls of her room. It was a moving experience, and very worthwhile.

We had supper at a nearby pancake place, with the Dutch pancake somewhere between the American version and a French crepe. We took a slow and casual walk back home, enjoying the amazing interiors of the houses that we could see through the large windows, and we loved the various lights playing off the water of the canals.

So, whether it is looking for bagels or getting pancakes, travel always gives you food for thought.

Little delays can add up; our plane was delayed in loading cargo, and so we sat on the plane for thirty minutes or more before finally taking off an hour late. Then, at the Amsterdam airport, it was a bit of a hike to passport control, where there was a huge crowd of people being held out of the entrance area for reasons we could not tell. Happily, Dubbs saw a sign for another entrance to passport control, which was another fair hike. It was open, which was great. What was less great was that they only had one person working the desk for non-EU passports, and so it took a little over an hour to clear the passport counter. The good news from that wait was that our luggage was waiting for us, so that was efficient.

The delays made us all decide that getting a ride from an Uber driver was worth it, so after a ten-minute wait for the driver, we were shuttled to our AirBnB residence, which worked well. Our host, Andy, was super friendly and gave us lots of information about Amsterdam. I think the information will be useful, but it did take thirty minutes to communicate when all we could think about was bed. So, after a very, very long twenty-eight-hour day, we finally got to go to sleep for a couple of hours. If given a choice, I will avoid ever doing that long a day again when traveling – it is too hard to function in a new environment on so little sleep.

The world was both literally and figuratively sunny when we woke up mid-afternoon. It is a northern city in November, and so will still be cold (in the low 40s), but the sun helps a lot. After a couple of quick showers, we spilled out into the old city center of Amsterdam.

Not surprisingly, it is stunningly cute. There are canals everywhere, and all of the streets are lined with three- or four-story houses with colorful facades and fancy roof lines. The Dutch seem very fond of large windows, so we could see inside many houses and apartments, and it seems the Dutch love books; despite limitations on space, many houses had a room for a library.

Mer was in charge of the afternoon, and so she led us south to the museum district. It was a beautiful walk. The canals make the neighborhoods scenic and slow down motor traffic, although the Dutch seem to have the low-country love affair with the bicycle, so we learned very quickly to check to make sure we were not accidentally in the bike lane. We have an informal bet about who is going to get knocked down by a biker first.

A close-second bet is who is going to fall down the stairs first. Because so many of the buildings are so narrow, but still fairly tall, we’re guessing the old buildings in Amsterdam must have at one time been taxed on square footage of the ground floor. Our apartment is no different – we are on the third floor, and both sets of stairs are the steepest stairs I have ever seen, and for good measure wrap around at the top of the flight, just to make the steep stairs harder.

The museum area of Amsterdam is beautiful – multiple open spaces with dramatic buildings scattered throughout. The park was in use and was lit with tons of lights, and skaters were already skating on a rink. At the same time, a trio of people were tossing a Frisbee around, which is not something you usually see with ice skaters nearby.

We went into a museum to buy a Museumkaart, which gives you unlimited access to Amsterdam’s museums. Or, more accurately, it did. Now, you get five visits on the card, and have the option to register it to get the full version, which gets mailed to you. This is not the best option for tourists here for just one week. So Mer scrapped her plan of visiting the modern art museum for an hour, and we went to find supper.

Here too, we hit a bit of a snag. The first place we went was a small pub, and was packed out. Europeans eat later than Americans do, and it was only around 5:30, but that did not stop people from being social over a coffee or beer. We moved on to another restaurant, where we had more success.

Mer had no firm plans for after supper except to see the city, so we wandered south a couple of blocks to a park, which was very pretty in the dark, except for the few places that were not well lit. Otherwise, the lights reflected off small canals, and it was lovely, except for the cold that descended after the sun went down.

We all brought warm winter clothing, but I still got cold on the hour or so walk back to the apartment. I must be out of practice. We walked in the general direction of our home, but felt free to be distracted by lights or anything that looked interesting (including a friendly tom cat). While the Christmas lights are not anywhere near so extensive as Lisbon’s promised to be last year at this time, Amsterdam has the distinct advantage of having the lights already turned on. It’s a bit of a coup, really.

We got back to the rooms fairly early for us, around 7:30. That is wise given the little sleep we have had, and Amsterdam promises to be fun to explore tomorrow.

Last spring, our friend Dubbs got a notification on her phone that there was a Cleveland-to-Amsterdam flight available for $550 (via Toronto). With the chance to eliminate the five-hour drive back home from Toronto while jet-lagged, we jumped at the chance. The only downside is that the flight left on a Friday, which is a school day. Still, it left in the afternoon, so Meredith and Dubbs thought they would only miss a class or two, and could get a sub to cover for those periods.

Little did we know – airlines have the right to make radical changes to the schedule of flights without notice or compensation if you book more than a few months out. Lufthansa did just that, changing our Cleveland-to-Toronto flight time to leaving at 6:20 am. Not only did that mean we would miss the whole day of school, not only did it mean we would have to get up at 2:30 am to get ready and get to the airport, but it gave us about a twelve-hour layover in the Toronto airport.

We decided to make the best of things, and when we got to Toronto, we found a baggage-storage place, ditched our backpacks, and took the train into downtown. Our main goal was the Art Gallery of Ontario (an art museum), but it did not open until 10:30, and we got to Union Station at 9:00. So off we trekked into the spitting snow/rain mix, off to St. Lawrence Market.

St. Lawrence Market turned out to be what I had hoped it would be – a giant indoor market where vendors sold meat and fruits and such. That is not much use to the traveler with no refrigeration, but it was interesting to wander around, and, as I expected, it also had some eateries. So we had a leisurely breakfast, and then walked it off on the thirty-minute walk to the art museum.

The museum was a bit of a surprise to me – it kind of springs up on you in the middle of a business and housing area of mostly tall buildings. It was also oddly busy for a random Friday morning, but that may have been school trips.

We spent about three hours at the museum, wandering from gallery to gallery. We lingered a bit more where there was an exhibit of personal photo albums from World War I, since Meredith teaches All Quiet on the Western Front (a novel about the war). That was interesting and sobering, and pictures of soldiers from India and of troops in Egypt were reminders that it was a world-wide war.

We explored the European art section, which started around 1200 and was laid out roughly in chronological order. As always, I liked the religious art and the examples of sculpture, especially since the museum had several Rodin works.

Mer and I had seen that the museum was offering a volunteer-led hour-long tour at 1:00, so we left to take the tour while Dubbs did her museum thing. There were only five of us on the tour, so it was very personable, and the woman took us on a quick overview of the building; it was equally about art and the building’s architecture. The building underwent an expansion in 2008, and they did a great job, adding wings made of glass, stone, and wood. In one painting by Tintoretto called “Christ Washing His Disciples’ Feet”, our guide said no one knew who Judas was in the painting. I pointed out it was probably the only disciple who had his back to Jesus, and he also had a money bag on his belt (Judas kept the money bag for the disciples, as well as taking money to betray Jesus). It seemed pretty obvious to me….even if Wikipedia identifies Judas as the man by himself in the left-hand side. Clearly wrong.

We met up with Dubbs at 2:00, and she summed an Uber ride to get us back to Union Station, which saved us thirty minutes of walking. That was a good call. The train ride back to the airport was smooth, and security was easy, so we had time for an early supper before settling in near our gate with about three hours to wait.

So, usually “Day 0” of our trips is just about getting to Europe, but today was a pretty fun day in Toronto.