It was a long journey– the kids did great considering, but we were exhausted yesterday after a night of not much sleep and then a day of lugging around our gear. The flight from Providence to Dublin was uneventful (well, except for that one guy who yelled at me because my water bottle shot water at him due to cabin pressure. I apologized profusely and offered a napkin. He glared. I moved on.) Willy, Alice, and I shared a row, James sat behind us on another and then Mike chilled with the other Men of Unusual Size on the exit row. Alice got the most sleep, but she needed more.

After a couple of hours in Dublin including a hot breakfast, we took RyanAir to Amsterdam. It was a blessedly short flight. Then we made our way to the totally awesome Hotel Not Hotel. I found it on the web and it is just as cool and amazing as we hoped it would be. The rooms are super comfy and cozy. So creative and fun (we wanted the rooms hidden in the library walls, but as they only hold two guests each, we opted for the Casa No Casa and the Tram Car).

Trying to stay up late enough to beat back jet lag, we took a walk through the neighborhood and found a playground and kinderborderij (children’s farm). It brought back a lot of memories as there was a similar kinderborderij near our place in Enschede. We spent many hundreds of hours there with James (and a baby Willy) before we left. Alice threw off her shoes, put on some klompen (clogs) and immediately jumped in to playing with other kids. In addition to the farm there was what we called “brick town”– super fun little clump of tine brick structures to play on.

We came back at sunset, then tried to arrange dinner for the very tired kids (the hotel not hotel has an excellent Thai restaurant). We put everyone to sleep, and then Mike and I woke up at midnight Dutch time. Which is like 5 PM east coast time, which makes no sense. Then Alice woke up. Yikes. After some creative parenting we were able to get everyone to sleep and wake up in the actual morning.

Today we’ll hang out in AMS a little longer than take the train to Alpen aan de Rijn to see some friends.

New foods tried [not including dessert] : One (James: Spicy Thai beef and cashews. Willy and Alice were already asleep after devouring turkey sandwiches)

Modes of transportation on which we have embarrassed ourselves: Two (and counting).One taxi and one plane (not both planes– when that guy yelled at me, I was not embarrassed, but he should have been). Both incidents were of the Alice-complaining aloud variety. Small victories!