Amsterdam, We Are On Our Way

 As I write this particular blog, we are on an airplane flight to Amsterdam. So, it won’t be posted until after we are settled into our motel room, sometime tonight, whenever tonight is.

This trip came about when we were in Portland, so long ago. When? I have no idea but would need to look at my photos. It is a fact of life that, if it were not for photos, I’d have no idea where we were whenever. But it is a fact that we’d planned a trip to Oregon and then our truck was stolen, so we flew to Portland. We salvaged our trip to see our grandkids, and kids.

While we were in Portland, actually sitting on our son and daughter-in-law’s couch, I got an email from United. It was United’s 40’th birthday and we could book a trip, that day only, for specific places for 40,000 frequent flier miles. I’d turned to Dale and asked should we fly to Amsterdam or Ireland. Then we both agreed that Amsterdam was interesting and I booked our flights.

Now, several months later, we are in a plane, flying from Chicago to Amsterdam. In the meantime, we have read travel books, looked at on-line travel sites, and on our way.

The trip in itself has been quite the adventure. We had to fly in and out of San Francisco, which isn’t the end of the world. We love San Francisco, looked around to move here several years ago, but haven’t originated our flights from there.

Packed and ready to go

We drove to San Francisco on Sunday, but wanted to check out the park and fly lots. We wanted to make sure of what we needed to do on Monday a.m. We found our motel and a park and fly lot just on the other side of the highway. Before checking into the motel, we went to the lot and I verified that we could come in the morning with no problem. We didn’t need a reservation. “Don’t worry, you can self-park”. Well, the “Don’t Worry” should have been the signal to worry!

We went to our hotel, opened a bottle of wine and ate the dinner I’d made some time ago and froze. We slept, I made myself a Greek Salad, in the event there was no gluten free food on the plane, repacked our stuff and off we went to the airport parking lot.

Well, what we were not told that without a reservation, the parking is with valet only and the price jumps. Unfortunately, we needed to get to the airport, so had no choice. Then Dale understood the parking valet to say that it was $100.00 a day so he is thinking $1,400.00 for the 2 weeks. I heard $19.99 a day, which was higher than the $12.99 a day I saw on-line so I’m saying just forget about the money. We need to get to the airport as our flight is in 3 hours. I was right, Dale misheard but it really didn’t matter at that point in time; $100 or $19.99, we had to leave the truck and get to the airport. The price was $19.99.

Sushi at SFO

I love large airports. We are TSA approved and makes it easy, a few short lines, lots of help. We made it onto the plane to Chicago, our stop before Amsterdam.

In Chicago, we didn’t have much time to get to our next gate. Then, we didn’t see Amsterdam on the board but a United person saw it and pointed it out.

Once at the gate in Chicago we had to go thru another screening. This time for our passports, boarding passes, Covid vaccine cards and a Passenger Locater Form. I’d searched for these instructions before leaving home as I’d filled out these PLF forms for every country on our very recent Europe trip. I did not find any instructions on United or the Netherlands.gov site.

So here we were, we could not get on our flight until the PLF was filled out. However, the United personal did not have any forms and these particular ones could not be filled out on-line, unlike Italy, Greece and France. Then several other passengers who did not have the forms showed up in the line and none of us were not happy campers. Fortunately, a United employee thought to go print the forms, he brought them back, we filled them out and were on our way. But it was a few harrowing minutes.

We did feel badly for the several people who showed up with the wrong Covid test results. The test requirements had recently changed so people were going to miss the flight due to getting the wrong tests. The correct tests were being given somewhere in the airport but we don’t know if the passengers got the tests and results done in time.

I’d made a Greek Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers and feta cheese I’d brought from home, the tomatoes and cucumbers from our son. Sure enough, there was no gluten free food on our flight from San Francisco to Chicago so I had my salad. I’d cut up extra tomato and cucumber so added those to my olive oil and Modena Balsamic vinegar in Chicago.

Once on the plane to Amsterdam, we had lots of time, as we have an early boarding code. I asked the flight attendant if any of the dinners were gluten free. She came back and said no, verified by another flight attendant who said she had verified as she is celiac as well. I figured I’d eat the rest of my Greek Salad.

As it turned out the flight attendants put together a meal of green salad, potato chips and gummy bears for me. It was really sweet and nice to have something besides a warm Greek Salad. I’ll be sending a nice review for them!

For now, we are on our 2^nd’ small bottle of wine. Going to sleep because we will get into Amsterdam in the morning, their time. Until tomorrow!