Tulips and Iceland

It is finally here. We are off to The Netherlands for the Tulip Festival at Keukenhoff Gardens and our cruise on the Cara with Amadeus Cruises.

Two hours and eleven minutes from home to Orlando quickly turns into over three hours when traffic is nearly stopped as you approach Disney world. We left plenty of time to get there and also to visit my cousin before boarding our Icelandair flight though Reykjavik to Amsterdam.

After catching up with my cousin over lunch and parking our car with a “Park and Fly” hotel stay he dropped up at the international terminal. My gamble on bidding for a business class upgrade paid off and we got better seats and access to the airport lounge. If you have never been in one it is so much nicer than just waiting at the gate to board.

After a couple glasses of champagne and snacks there was a Disney level Orlando thunderstorm complete with brilliant white flashes of lightning and cracks of thunder. The water pouring down the tall airport windows reminded me of childhood awe at the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland in Anaheim.

It turns out they do not like to fuel jets during thunderstorms. Hence we were over an hour late in departing.

When finally in the air I connected my new noise canceling headphones and searched the inflight entertainment hoping to find Maverick Top Gun. To my disappointment it was not available. In scrolling through the offerings I came across an old favorite of mine. The book that got me reading books. The Hobbit. An Unexpected Adventure.

With time to kill and nowhere else to go I started it up and found a quote meaningful to me today. Gandolf said,”The world is not in those books and maps you have. It’s out there.” And so I set out, once again, to step beyond the books, maps, movies, and virtual reality into actual reality. And loving it. Even if flying makes my butt hurt. There was no sleeping on that flight, but that is one of the prices you sometimes pay to travel.

With our leaving an hour late from Orlando we had almost no time for our transfer in Iceland to our flight to Amsterdam. We made it to the plane with no drama and settled into our upgraded seats for the three hour flight to our destination. Now that the sun was up the more comfortable seats and improved legroom did not allow sleep. Doing so would have just made jet lag worse the next day. Stay up and go to be at the normal time for where you are now.

Our first glimpse of The Netherlands confirmed that the flowers were ready for us to arrive. Brilliant fields of red, yellow, and pink shined up at us from below in a patchwork of tulip fields.

When we disembarked from the flight we were expecting to go through customs, but it never came. Since Iceland is part of the European Union we were not required to do so. Our driver, Richard, called us just as we were leaving the baggage claim area and we were off to the Movenpick Hotel just a quarter mile from where our riverboat, the Cara, was waiting for us to join it the following day.

Part to do a dry run, part to get some exercise, and part to just see a bit of Amsterdam we walked the route to the ship and then looped up into the old city. There were tulips and gardens along the route along with the homes of the old families of the Dutch and old and new boats. The boats were old sail boats to cruise ships and others that had been converted to homes and bed and breakfast rentals.

Still trying to adjust to the change of time and meals we just ate some of our leftover food from traveling and wrapped it up for the night. Tomorrow we board for our week long cruise of The Netherlands and Belgium.