Trip Summary

This isn't really a trip summary but instead it is a place for comments go that have no other home.

First, the disclaimer on everything I've told you. Some facts might be inaccurate, but I've done my best.

We enjoyed a ton of great food, especially in Amsterdam. The hotel concierge team was helpful every evening in pointing us to a new restaurant.  We tried a wide variety including typical Dutch food. Tomato soup and split pea soup are very common items on Dutch restaurant menus. In addition to Dutch food, we had Italian, Indonesian, and Argentinian to name a few.

I think I said it before but we walked a lot every day to try to make up for the delicious food mentioned above.

In The Netherlands there are coffee shops and cafes. One serves coffee, the other does not, but serves up something quite different. Asking yourself what I'm talking about? Look it up. Come on, I've already given you so much information.

On most days,  B and I enjoyed some "game shows" on Dutch TV stations. There were several. We think the shows originate in the UK. On one show contestants had to find a way to combine a set of given numbers using multiplication, division, addition and subtraction to total the answer provided. Sometimes the generator of the numbers would give the contestants an impossible target. In that case the closest contestant won.  Another aspect of the show was where the contestants took turns obtaining random consonants and vowels. A  "card-turner", think Vanna White, would turn the cards over as the contestant said, consonant, another consonant, a vowel, another consonant... you get the picture.Then both contestants would try to make up the longest word using those letters. You could only use each letter once. On this show they even had a couple of "guest" panelists who also tried to outdo the contestants. During the show, the panelists would discuss the origins of an interesting word. Anyway, spelling and math on a TV show!Wow! Fun to watch but the times given the contestants were a little on the short side—I think 30 seconds.  I think this one was called Countdown. There was another one with trivia questions. Contestants could answer the question themselves or send the question to another contestant. Once the starting number of contestants had been reduced to 2, they battled until there was one winner. Each show began with 15 contestants and got one winner at the end. This one might have been called 15 to One.

I saw this state of the art toilet flush mechanism in Amsterdam.

We saw several of these tiny, tiny "cars" in Amsterdam. It must be much easier to park this baby than a regular size car. Not much hauling capacity, however.

There are tons of bridges, roughly 800,000 people in Amsterdam and 600,000 bicycles. Did you notice how many of our photos contained folks on bicycles? We stayed in the Central Station area. This area is highly congested. There are car lanes, bus lanes, tram lanes and bicycle lanes. You must navigate them all to cross the streets. We did need to be very careful because the cyclists do not stop for pedestrians. And there are so many cyclists. You have probably seen cyclists in most of our outdoor photos.

What about OSU Buckeye football while I was away. The first weekend K and I are able to stream it live to my tablet beginning at 9:30pm Amsterdam time. That wasn't too bad. On our return flight from Amsterdam, B and I watched the middle portion of the game (again streaming live) from the airline lounge in the Dubai airport. I believe it was in the middle of the night Dubai time. We missed the beginning and the end because we were on airplanes but got to see more than 50% of the game.

If you are wondering about the difference between Holland and The Netherlands, feel free to do some research on this too.  It's too complicated to fully explain here.

 Yep, we saw a lot! Just some of our passes and tickets. We didn't manage to hang on to all of them. That's the last of the vacation posts.