Arriving from Vancouver, Canada, S.R. and I found ourselves “stuck by design” in Amsterdam, NL for 22⅜ hours!

A little known tip in air travel:

On a Domestic USA itinerary may stop for 4 hours without a price adjustment. On an international itinerary, you may stop for up to 23 hours and 59 min with no price differential. Therefore, by staying 22⅜ hours in Amsterdam, we could see some sights, have a beer, and hang out for a day at no charge to us! As I was in Amsterdam only a month or two before, I didn’t want to bother spending too much time here so it was a perfect quick trip!


Our aging KLM MD-11 YVR-AMS.
I would have to say that this flight was quite uneventful. The plane was a standard MD-11, but the seats were TORTURE! It was probably the smallest coach seat i’ve ever sat in. Someone please remind me to use my status and reserve an exit row seat next time. However, for other reasons I will not explain, I wasn’t able to get much sleep. Needless to say when arriving into Amsterdam, I was very very exhausted.

After getting off the airplane, S.R. and I quickly processed ourselves through baggage claim and Immigration. Since I have already been through AMS airport a few times, I knew that there were some handy storage lockers in AMS to hold all of our belongings. We figured since we’d just simply stay awake all night and party, we wouldn’t need our belongings. Running downstairs, we changed and stuffed all of our belongings into the secure lockers, sans one backpack, and hopped on the express train, at 7 Euros for 2, to Amsterdam.

It was a beautiful day. Walking out of the main train station, I exchanged a few hundred USD to Euros and started to enjoy Amsterdam. I’ve found that besides the ATM, the money changers in Amsterdam tend to charge much less than in the Airport.

The streets where there is plenty of shopping.

The beautiful canals and delft houses. (if you look more closely, the canals are quite dirty)


Look, there are Chinese food EVERYWHERE!


More Chinese food…in the Netherlands!


More shopping. Look S.R. ONLY has one shopping bag!

What else? The famous Dutch wooden shoes..err shoe. Too bad it wasn’t a roller skate! That would have been pimp!

Of course, it IS the land of fresh Heineken!

After shopping, S.R. and I went to eat some Italian food then cruised the bars and coffee shops looking for more beer. However, on a Wednesday most parties or bars were open until just past midnight. Bored, cold, and tired, we started to look for a hostel/hotel/flophouse at 1AM. After finding a flophouse, we crashed out until 8AM.

Before we even left San Francisco, we decided on a list of things to see or do on our entire trip.

One of those items on S.R. todo list was to visit the Anne Frank house. After consulting with a map and a police officer, we were unable to locate it. Walking down the correct street, we completely passed it. However, on the return I noticed a very small sign.


The sign I almost missed.

Up close.


Up the STEEP stairs towards the attic. It’s not exactly disabled friendly. Then again, almost all of Europe isn’t.


Our 737, with very comfortable seats which would take us to Romania!

Tired, smelly, and not so hungry…on the way to Romania.