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Introduction

This is a rather disjointed summary of our trip to Amsterdam, Cologne, Bavaria, and Paris this summer. We traveled from July 1st to July 15th and spent most of the trip (except flying) with my sister. She lives in Cologne. The post is mostly about capturing things that will hopefully trigger our imagination later in conjunction with the images we captured. There are oh so many images. I may never sort through them. Heck, I don’t think I even finished the posts about Yellowstone or South Africa yet. Thus, these will be fairly succinct.

back to day one

Day one was travel. To save money on airfare, we flew out of Seattle and landed in Amsterdam (and left from Paris). Even though we’ve known we were going for months, there was still a last minute rush to organize and thin our carry-on bags. Then, we loaded up the cars and made great time getting to Tacoma, where we stashed the cars with a friend. We dropped off the luggage and grabbed some horrible food from a dumpy teriyaki place. To wear out the kids before the long flight, we went to Kadel Park, where there’s a wave pool. Even though the skys were cloudy and the weather rather cool, we spent nearly 2 hours in the water playing and swimming. Everyone agreed that it was a blast. We took an Uber to SeaTac (there were no Lyft drivers) and our driver was a lifetime welder from Vietnam. Really cool guy who got us there in no time. We also raced through security and had to find ways to occupy ourselves while waiting for the flight. That included multiple trips to the bathroom, random wandering, and trying to watch a Timbers game on my phone. Eventually we boarded and hunkered down for the long red-eye flight.

Amsterdam 2017 (66)
Amsterdam 2017 (64)

Amsterdam 2017 (17)

Thanks to the modern entertainment systems, it was easy for the kids (and adults) to entertain themselves. Michelle and the girls all managed to get some sleep, but I wasn’t able to get more than maybe 30 minutes (thanks, Melatonin). But we’ll pretend that day one ended with everyone asleep in the air flying over Hudson Bay and Greenland.
Amsterdam 2017 (60)