Amsterdam

July 12 - 14, 2019

Warmond and Amsterdam, The Netherlands

We were very lucky to spend three lovely days with Jos and Christa. It was the perfect end to our six week trip. They live very close to Amsterdam in the small town of Warmond and have a really cool house. It was originally two, 400-year-old farm houses, which at some point were joined together. The story is that the Dutch painter Jan Steen had lived there once upon a time. Because of the age of the structures, there are a lot of exposed wood beams, gussets, funny nooks, and odd angles. One of the most fun details is a circular brick well that has been converted into a dining room table. 

Kylie and I went out running again on Saturday and Sunday. It was cloudy, but didn’t rain so we ran out of town and around the nearby golf course.  Unfortunately, on the second day, during our speed workout, she pulled a muscle in her calf. She was limping in the way home so I’m pretty sure we’ll be taking a couple days off.

Jos and Christa had a garage full of bikes, so we decided to ride into the nearby university town of Leiden. No one in Holland wears a helmet, so, of course, we didn’t want to stick out. What fun to ride along the busy bike paths and bustling canal side brick roads. Once in town, we walked our bikes down into an underground parking garage with cool, double-decker bike racks. Awesome. 

We spent Saurday afternoon walking around town — markets, fort, old Catholic Church. Jos is a wealth of information about the history of the area. For lunch we got to try a Dutch croquet — a hugely popular hotdog shaped fast food item with a hard crispy outer breadcrumb coating and a thick stew like inner filling, usually with meat, potatoes and bread all mashed up together.  Not bad. 

Dex had spied an old game of Risk at Jos and Christa’s, so we played a couple tournaments during the weekend. Christa’s strategy was clearly superior during our first game as she easily marched across continents at the end to claim victory. 

Sunday was another grey day, (Jos assures is it is not always this way). After breakfast, we borrowed Jos and Christa’s canoe, for a slow paddle around the nearby island. I sat in the back, which meant I was supposedly in charge of steering.  As a result it was a bit of a zig-zaggy tour. We saw lots of birds and even rowed passed a couple old windmills. We always enjoy getting on the water for a while. 

It was funny to see Jos dressed up in a suit on Monday morning. Jos works for a small insurance company that provides surety bonds for large projects usually overseas. As a result, he tends to travel a lot. After college, he lived in Kansas, then later, after marrying Christa, moved to New Hampshire where their sons, Adrian and David were born. With the two young boys in tow, their next stop was Jakarta. 

For our last day in the country, we set our sights on the Rijks Museum and a canal boat ride. Jos dropped us off in the city on his way to work. The Rijksmuseum was very impressive. Apparently, the most valuable object in the building is the huge painting, The Night Watch, by Rembrandt. It is mounted on two large vertical rails, one on each side. In case if an emergency, a slot opens in the floor, the painting drops through, and it is whisked away to safety. 

The Rijks Museum

Rembrandt's, The Night Watch

We enjoyed the canal tour. Amsterdam’s golden age was in the 1600’s. The city was growing very rapidly due to trading of the Dutch East India Company, so many people became rich from tobacco, real estate speculation, flowers etc. That explains the impressive row houses lined up along so many of the canals. 

Although, it had never really occurred to me, the Netherlands, situated in the Atlantic, has plenty of beaches. The closest to Jos and Christa’s house is only 20 minutes away in Noordwijk. For our last night together on Monday, Meg and I suggested having dinner at the beach restaurant where we’d been shut out our first night there. Though the weather remained cloudy and drizzly, we enjoyed a nice stroll along the beach and had fantastic dinner together. Here’s to good food and good friends.

Off the Bikes

Belgrade, Serbia

It was really nice to all be back together again. After the rainy weather in Warsaw, the weather was perfect, sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-70s, make it that much more special. Our itinerary for the day included two museums — the Tesla museum and the Museum of Illusions — with a nice lunch in between, of course. 

Morning run, the Danube in the background

As an engineer, the Tesla museum was really interesting to see. It’s small and there is very little information about the displays, however, if you take the tour, there is an excellent short film about Tesla’s life and some very cool demonstrations afterward. Nicola Tesla is probably the world’s most famous Serbian (perhaps, these days, after Novak Djokovic) though he lived most of his life in the US. Last summer we had read “Tesla’s Attic” as our family book. The story is science fiction fantasy but included a surprisingly large number of facts about Tesla’s life. For example, he and Edison were true rivals, Edison advocating for DC electricity and Tesla for AC. Tesla has hundreds of patents, but his invention of the three-phase AC induction motor is likely his most famous. Even today, this motor is used in a huge array of household appliances and, in fact, is used as the primary motor In Tesla cars. 

Nikolai Tesla

The Induction motor

After the movie, there were demonstrations to help explain one of Tesla’s most radical ideas, wireless transmission of power. Back in the 1800s, he had acquired financing from JP Morgan to build a large working prototype of this concept. It consisted of a huge wooden tower on Long Island. The idea was to use a huge transformer to create a 100,000-volt electrical discharge at the top of the tower. This lightning bolt, would in turn create a giant magnetic field around the tower. As a result, the current would flow in any conductive circuit within the field. This was demonstrated in the museum by having volunteers hold fluorescent lightbulbs in the air, which would light up during the discharge. The discharge, however, was accompanied by an incredibly loud crackling/zapping sound. 

For lunch, we made our way over to the Little Bay Restaurant. We’d walked by it the other day and Meg had seen signs for it all over town. Although we sat on the sidewalk, the interior was really cool as it used to be a small theater.

Little Bay Restaurant

Our visit to the Illusion Museum was also great fun for an hour or so. 

When we got back to the hotel, it was time to start dismantling the bikes. Meg came down to help, which was really nice. After the frame was split apart on one bike, she started the long, slow process of wrapping all the painted bits in foam rubber, while I continued pulling things apart and starting the jigsaw-puzzle process of stuffing everything into the four suitcases. Kylie came down later and helped Meg wrap the second bike. Incredibly, in only three and a half hours they were both safely packed away. 

The best part of the day, however, was still to come. As we were packing up the bikes, three men came up wheeling bikes of their own. Rodger, David, Jerry, along with Rodger’s wife, Cheryl, had just completed a ride of their own from Belgrade we’ll into Bulgaria. They were nice enough to extend their happy hour a while so we could finish up the packing and wash up for dinner. We, of course, had many stories to share of our biking mishaps (or adventures). Roger and Cheryl live in Minnesota while David and Jerry live near each other in Rhode Island. They were an impressive group, David was an ER doctor, Jerry an environmental lawyer, Roger a prison inmate educator, and Cheryl a special education

teacher.

David and Jerry

Cheryl and Roger

 

The next day was dedicated to travel. Kylie and I did run to a park a mile or so away, then did 400 and 200 m sprints. Unfortunately, to do the 400, we ran 200 along a straight path, then made a U-turn to sprint back on a parallel path.  I cut the corner at the end, slipped in some mud, and hit the pavement. Kylie yelped, but kept going at my urging. It was merely a flesh wound.

Merely a flesh wound

At 1:30, we were off to the airport. It was pretty iffy if we could actually fit our six giant check-in bags plus us and our carryons into the Audi station wagon. We were about to arrange a second taxi when the driver managed to stuff everything in… as long as there were four in the back seat. 

I was a little annoyed when, once we started moving, the driver immediately started talking about an accident on the highway, which meant, he explained, we’d have to take a longer way to the airport. He wasn’t aware, apparently, that I had just taken a taxi to the airport a couple days ago and had already heard this story, which increased the $20 ride to $30. I also knew that the “longer” way was in reality simply the direct route using the fast-moving freeway void of any slowdowns whatsoever. In the end, despite the $37 (3800 dinars) reading on the meter, he had little choice but to accept the $27 in dinars we had saved for the ride.

The final few days in Europe would be spent in Amsterdam. We had flown in and out of the Capital city because of friends, Jos and Christa, who we had the good fortune of meeting in the Galapagos a couple years earlier. We had originally hoped to meet them on the front end of the trip, but a business trip had gotten in the way. Despite a two-hour delay at the airport and not making it to the Sassenheim train station near the small town of Warmond, Jos and Christa were there to meet us.