Well, the trip that caught my eye early last year (and we started planning for the same day) is finally here. So we packed our bags, left Eliot with the kitties, and had Lee & Dianne drop us off at the airport.
We’re headed out on a river cruise of the Rhine on the AmaCello, part of the AMA Waterways river cruise fleet. Much, much smaller than we are used to, only 150 passengers, and all of them geeks of one kind or another (there’s a simultaneous science geek cruise, offering a side trip to the Max Planck Institute and the Supercollider).
We will be boarding in two days!
The trip to get here was long - we started at 9pm on Sunday (Hawaii time) and wound up in our room in the Grand Hotel Amrath in Amsterdam at about 11:30 am Tuesday (Netherlands time). The flight pattern went from Honolulu - Orange County - Houston - Amsterdam. And took forever! Our longest segment was 10 1/2 hours. I need to look at cruises on my side of the planet in the future. It would not have been so bad, but I have been crippled with the traveler’s disease since yesterday, and have not slept in 25 hours. Until a little bit ago. We took a short nap after checking in after literally taking planes, trains and automobiles. I was so tired and impacted by, ahem, the effects of the disease I was wobbly on my feet. The desk captain looked at me and went, “Oh, bad jet lag, I see.”
For the first time in our overseas (South America and Europe, to be precise), we wound up in a room with a comfy king size bed, and a tub made for someone of Dad’s size, not Will’s! Yeah!
First impressions - Amsterdam airport was not nearly as hectic as all those years ago when I was headed to Moscow to meet a certain Will with his family. All my luggage made it, none of my connections were delayed, and I didn’t have to deal with Aeroflot. And it was like coming to a country filled with me - glamazon women of my height wearing 4 inch heeled boots tooling around there airport. To be certain, there are a fair number of short people as well, but we’re no longer in the land of the menehunes.
I’m still a bit tired, but we need to stay up, and I need to figure out if I have managed to damage my FTP client. I’m still trying to post the blog from Costa Rica! Hopefully some of my MacGeek friends will be able to help me out.
