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| Glenn's Journal for 9-12-02 to 9-13-02 - Amsterdam Good Morning!!! The day has arrived!!! We are leaving today for a 8 1/2 month adventure around the world. Just a little recap on our past 6 months includes me leaving my job in Seattle, moving to Los Angeles, traveling through Southern Europe for 3 months, and then living in Los Angeles while Erin takes care of some family business. The excitement of departing today is the fact that we did not know (for sure) that we were leaving today until just 2 days ago. Erin completed all of her family business on Monday and I called our travel agent on Tuesday to verify we could get the original price on our initial ticket with KLM with only 2 days notice. Sure enough the ticket price was still valid and here we are 2 days later departing for our trip. Erin packed her bags on Sunday while I am still sitting here this morning working on last minute trip preparations and packing my bag. We leave for the airport around 12:15 pm to be there at 1:00 pm (3 hours before flight time). You never know how security will be until you get there. We made it through check-in and security within the hour and were sitting at the gate by 2:00 pm. Our flight scheduled for 3:55 pm was rescheduled to 10 minutes earlier (Have you heard of such a thing???). The flight was 10 1/2 hours to Amsterdam. We arrived at 11:30 am on the 13th of November (We are 9 hours ahead of LA in time zones) and were off to find a place to stay for a few nights and figure out the transportation system. Bad news!! Amsterdam is holding an International Broadcasting Conference and every place in town is overbooked. We ended up at the Forest Hostel Campground approximately 45 minutes out of town. The campground had pre-setup tents with 4 beds per tent and lockers. This would do for now as we did not want to pay 200+ Euros a night for a room. We met Lilian and Cristiano as they arrived at the campsite about the same time that we did. They are from Brazil but Cristiano is living in Berlin for studies while Lilian is traveling around Europe for a while. We would run into them a few times over the next few days. We shared the tent with 2 nice young ladies from Osaka, Japan (Reika and Chihiro). The ladies went into town while we decided to take it easy so we could work off the jet lag and the 9 hour time difference. We settled into our tent and then took a stroll around the camp before returning for a nap. We awoke around 6:00 pm, cleaned up, and headed off to find some dinner. Our first stop was the restaurant and grocery store located on the campsite premises. After that we agreed we would like a few more options so we headed out of the campground looking for the nearest town. After aout a 20 minute walk we found a local restaurant in Amstelveen. It was the first one that we had found and we were ready to eat so we stopped. The menu was, of course, in German so we had the waitress help us with our initial lesson in German. We enjoyed some local wine with dinner before heading back to the campground around 9:30 pm. We chatted with Reika and Chihiro for a while before calling it a night. |
| Our campground was out of town and near this beautiful landscape!!! |