Lori and Troy do Europe 2025

Today is 52 and light rain. We headed to breakfast with the hopes that it will match the 5 star accommodations. It ended up being everything that we hoped for and more. They had everything from waffles to made to order omelettes and even had menu items that looked 5 star. We stored up the food as appropriate for the cold temperature and headed back to the room.

We plotted our path to the Anne Frank Museum which is about a 15 min walk. Amsterdam is pretty flat so this should be a piece of cake. We stepped out into the street and quickly remembered what we learned the last time that we visited here. 1. Keep your head on a swivel because there are cars, trains, bikes, mopeds and pedestrians everywhere. 2. If a bike comes up behind you, just keep walking. The bicyclist has already planned a route around you and if you try to dodge them you will mess up the traffic pattern. 3. When you cross a street watch for bikes, cars, trains, cars and then bikes again. Those are all dangers that you will endure just crossing from one side to the other.

The Anne Frank museum is actually built on the side of the actual house where she lived. We were lucky to get tickets because they sell out as soon as they are posted. We learned that the last time we were here. Lori actually visited this place when she was young. She said that it is completely different now. She remembered entering in the front of the house. Now you enter through a large museum on the side of the house and eventually enter the actual house through the museum. I think most people have read The Diary of Anne Frank but I must have been asleep or daydreaming when that book was assigned. I knew the story but I am glad the tour guide didn’t ask because I would have had to lie. It was a fascinating tour and a really sad story. Hopefully history will never repeat itself on that period in time. This was about 1.5 hr tour which seemed to go really fast.

Afterwords we decided to get something to eat. We were past hungry and approaching hangry. We settled on a Mediterranean restaurant which ended up being really good. While looking for a restaurant we ventured a little too far from the hotel. We plotted our way and it was a little over a mile walk. This was fine because this is a really beautiful city with many unique buildings and numerous canals. We were about 3 blocks when it started to sprinkle. We made it back before it started to really come down.

We stopped by the room and decided to visit the hotel bar which is supposed to be one of the better craft cocktail bars in Amsterdam. We ordered up a couple of Old Fashioned’s and talked with the bartenders. One was Greek and the other was from Argentina. Nice guys!

We ended the night early as we have to get up at 6am tomorrow. Our Uber is scheduled for 7:15am and we could not figure out how to schedule a pickup in front of our hotel. I think they may have specific pickup locations like they do at the airport. We tipped our bartenders well with some euro coins and cash that we still had on us.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy travel day. We are flying standby and there are about 18 open spots in Delta One (First Class cubicle) with us being number 12&13 on the list, so fingers crossed. Otherwise it may be a long 9 hour flight. There are 2 other flights schedule later in the day with good available seats so we will have to weigh whether we wait or just go.