Monday morning May 6th, we were scheduled for a 10am canal boat tour. It’s one of those things you just have to do while in Amsterdam, “Venice of the North”! The weather was amazing once again, and it was a small group on our boat…plus the canals were very quiet because it was early in the day. We learned all kinds of fun and interesting things about Amsterdam during the tour. The city was originally referred to as “the pretty lady with bad breath” because of sewage issues. There are 165 canals in the city, all of which were dug by hand and average about 3 meters in depth. It’s been determined that all of the canal walls need to be rebuilt; project is expected to take 100 years!
The canal houses are known for being crooked, and this is largely because everything is built on piles (so Amsterdam is also known as the ‘city of forests’) and those piles shift over time as more weight is put on them. Many of the canal houses are UNESCO sites, so their exteriors cannot be modified…and in some cases, neither can their interiors…so people are likely living with some crazy slanted floors.
Houseboats are everywhere in Amsterdam – there are over 2,500 of them. After WWII, there was a lack of housing, so the city issued free permits to allow people to have houseboats. Of course, they’re not free anymore…and some can sell for $600K or more (just for the permit…then you need to buy a houseboat).
Both bikes and cars get pulled from the canals regularly. There’s a boat that goes around searching for bikes; they remove about 12,000 each year. Early self-driving Teslas were not able to distinguish roads from canals, so they were ending up in the canals, too!
Along with canals and houseboats, Amsterdam is known for bikes. There are over 800K bikes in the city, compared to just 200K cars. You have to watch constantly for bikes coming at you – they’re going fast and you’re going to be flattened if you don’t get out of the way!
After the boat tour, we checked out the underwater bike garage – it holds about 7,000 bikes below the canal.
We ate lunch, and then hopped on a tram to the Rijksmuseum, the museum of the Netherlands, to check out some Dutch art and history. The museum is located at Museumplein with a few other museums and the city’s concert hall.
The building, opened in 1885, is impressive, as are the collections. We made our way to the Dutch Masters section to see what is probably the museum’s most famous piece, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch”. It is massive, and it’s incredible to think it was painted in 1642!
We wandered through a good portion of the museum, making our way through the crowds, to see paintings, furniture, porcelain, dolls’ houses, and more! Here are some of my favorite pieces…
There are just a few Van Gogh paintings at Rijkmuseum; most are next door at the Van Gogh Museum, but tickets for that were sold out!
From there, it was back to Centraal Station (the Dutch like to use double vowels…) and then a short walk to the library which has an observation deck that gave us some nice, panoramic views of Amsterdam. We stopped at a grocery store and picked up some salads and sandwiches for dinner…we had reached the point in our vacation when a big restaurant meal just didn’t sound appetizing and seemed like a lot of work!
It was time to head back to the hotel and pack…our two-week adventure was coming to a close.
Our travels home on May 7th went very smoothly. While we could have taken public transit to the airport, we decided to reserve a Bolt since we had our luggage. There was no traffic, since so few people own cars. Unfortunately, we arrived around the same time as a large tour group of people older than us, so it took absolutely forever just to get our bag tags and check our bags, but we finally made it through. Schiphol allows you to reserve a timeslot to go through security, so I had done that, and we breezed through…then a quick stop at passport control since we were leaving the Schengen region. It seemed like there were detours through the airport to get to the gate and it took forever. Apparently, United Airlines doesn’t have good gate privileges at Schiphol because we had to take a bus to our plane and climb up the steps – no jetway!
It was a very long (almost nine hours) but mostly smooth flight home, and with the time change, we landed about two hours after we left! Mobile Passport Control saved us some time going through customs in Chicago, we got our bags, and waited for the shuttle to take us to our car which was parked at a nearby hotel. Our timing was perfect…we exited the parking lot at 1:59pm and our reservation ended at 2pm. Back to reality. And Chicago traffic.
It truly was an amazing trip – we loved it all and it’s hard to even pick favorite days or activities because it was all so wonderful. We have so many incredible memories and once-in-a-lifetime moments. And boy, did we cover a lot of miles…certainly by air, water, and train…but also by foot. We logged about 72 miles. And I took a few photos to remember it all with – somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,500 pictures; I will be sorting through them for a very long time. Although we visited four countries with four different languages, we never had a language issue – most everyone we encountered spoke English quite well, and Google translate helped immensely when signs were only in German or French or Dutch. We absorbed so much incredible history, architecture, and culture everywhere we went.
As Mary Poppins would say, this trip was “practically perfect in every way”!
May 26, 2024, 12:48 pm
Awesome, awesome, awesome!
May 28, 2024, 11:40 am
I read every single word you wrote, looked at each and every picture, and enjoyed every single moment of it! The trip looked amazing and I can’t begin to imagine how much work you spend creating the fantastic travelogue. It’s engaging, well written, and the photos are perfect for your story. Very well done! Thanks for putting this all together so we could enjoy your trip with you.
May 29, 2024, 4:23 pm
INCREDIBLE, AMAZING.
I agree with Christine’s comments.
Thanks for sharing.