Airport, train, etc.

This is the first installment about our recent trip to The Netherlands. Our original flights had a nice layover at Dubai Airport, UAE. It was long enough, but not too long. Shortly before our travel dates the first leg of our trip was cancelled and we had to re-book the flight. Because we were meeting our friend K early on September 24, we had to arrive late on September 23. In order to achieve this goal, we ended up leaving here on a flight which departed in the wee, wee hours of September 23— 00:40 am to be exact—with a very long layover. This meant leaving the apartment at 9:45 pm. On the one hand this is an awful time to leave to go anywhere. On the other hand you can get on the plane and go to sleep. That's what we did. Unfortunately, I woke with a bad headache after a few hours. I probably fell to sleep in an odd position. At a certain point I became very nauseous. I only share this with all of you because when I needed access to the bathroom, all the bathrooms were full. The flight attendants kindly, quickly, escorted me up to an empty first class bathroom. The point of all of this is that the first class bathroom did not appear to be much different from the other bathrooms on the plane. I guess that surprised me.

When we originally learned we would have a nearly 10 hour layover, we thought perhaps we would leave the airport and "do something." There is actually an Atlantis franchise there. It appears to be similar to the Atlantis venue in the Bahamas. Because I was a little under the weather, we spent the entire time in the airport— most of it in the lounge. It was interesting to people watch for so many hours and it was a very nice lounge. We arrived at 4 - 5 am local time. The place was packed at that time! As the hours passed, the lounge emptied out and we were among the few remaining passengers. Here are the before and after photos.

I should also mention that the food was excellent and I found a new "green" drink- this was a cucumber mint drink. Yummy!

There was an entire wing of Indian food and late in our stay I tried some of these items. There was also free wifi!

The second leg of our trip was pretty uneventful. However, I couldn't really sleep much on this leg either. During the 13+ hours of actual flight time on the two flights I was able to enjoy the entire prior season of "Big Bang Theory". There are no commercials so each episode is pretty short.

We arrived at Amsterdam's airport at 8 pm. We were able to walk the short distance from the airport to our 1st night's hotel and crashed. The next morning, we walked back to the airport to await our friend, K's, arrival. Ta da!

We met K and off we went on the train to Arnhem. It was only a 1-1.5 hr train trip from Amsterdam to Arnhem. The trains work pretty well in The Netherlands. We struggled a little with schedules and buying tickets but managed to figure it out. Here's one of the train stations we encountered.

On arrival in Arnhem, we were able to walk to our hotel centrally located near the train station. This was our hotel.

We dumped our luggage, grabbed a bite to eat and we were off to investigate Arnhem.