Reunited in Amsterdam: Canals, Carriages and a Weekend in Bruges

We’re reunited in Amsterdam! Cody flew over a week ahead of us for his work week, meeting his coworkers and his boss in person for the first time, while Skye and I left Austin on Thursday and landed Friday morning. We had a direct flight this time, and nine hours felt easy compared to our treks to Asia, where you have to get in the mindset that you’ve basically moved into planes and airports for a while. Nine hours, one ocean, and there was Cody waiting for us. There’s a particular kind of happy that comes from finding your person in a foreign airport.

I’ll admit Amsterdam surprised me, and not entirely in the way I’d hoped. When I was a child and a young adult, I loved flying through Schiphol. It was the brightest, cleanest, most modern airport I’d ever seen. But that was pre-Singapore, pre-Incheon, and this time it looked tired to me. A little worn, like some of the streets. I’m only a few hours into this city as I write that, though, so I won’t make any grand pronouncements yet. There’s a lot you don’t know about a place after one afternoon.

What I do know already: the bikes here are almost as scary as the scooters in Vietnam. They aren’t nearly as dense, but they come flying around corners, and I’ve already had to jump out of the way more than once. Cody swears he watched two bikes crash into each other trying not to hit him, and they were on the sidewalk. Why were they on the sidewalk? Nobody knows. You learn fast to keep your head on a swivel here.

That first night we did the thing I love most about traveling with people who know how to travel: almost nothing. Cody brought Thai takeout from a place he’d already found and vetted during his work week, and we ate it in our room looking out over the river and the Olympic Stadium from the late 1920s. People were out late in the fields playing games, running, biking. It felt alive. The alarm was set for four hours later, and I tried to sleep.

I have to tell you about the airplane, because it still makes me smile. Skye and I had the very last row. Not glamorous, but nobody behind us and the whole row to ourselves. Then, halfway through the flight, an older man asked a flight attendant for a new seat. He wanted an aisle. He wanted OUR open aisle. No, sir. I put a bag on the seat and told the attendant, “My daughter is about to sleep here,” and she told him it wasn’t available. I like to believe that was the universe paying me back, because earlier that same day I’d given up my parking spot at a busy playground to a mom with little kids. I was just idling in the AC waiting for Skye’s homeschool co-op to finish and could move if I needed to. Karma, or balance, if you’d rather not attach any judgment to it.

And then there was the sign. Outside the airport there’s one of those big AMSTERDAM signs, and I stood Skye in front of it and started to cry. I have this same photo of her in Dubai, in Saigon, in front of oversized letters in cities all over the world. I used to think I’d travel less once I had a child. Instead she’s made me more curious, not less. I want to show her everything. I want to experience all of it WITH her. Lately she’s been talking about working for Travel365 when she’s older, leading group trips, and I can’t tell you what it does to me to imagine that: a business the whole family runs, built around the thing we love most, living each moment on purpose.

A weekend in Bruges

We barely gave ourselves time to land before we left again. Jet lag hit Skye and me so hard that Friday night became an accidental all-nighter, and at 6:30 on Saturday morning, running on zero sleep, we boarded a train for Bruges, Belgium. Tired but excited, we dropped our bags at our chocolate-themed boutique hotel and gave the old city a full day.

Bruges is whimsical and formidable at the same time. It’s a city out of medieval times, so the churches stand tall and grey against a greyish sky, but then there are these bright buildings, green and yellow and white, red brick with fancy facades, that rest your eyes. The streets were laid centuries before anyone imagined a car, so they’re tiny and cobblestoned and wander this way and that into little triangle intersections. Watching a giant coach bus try to navigate them is both impressive and a little sad, a symbol of human progress that just doesn’t belong here. The horse-drawn carriages make so much more sense.

Our carriage ride was the best part of our time in the city. Our guide was a very young, very confident man leading a whole convoy of carriages at speed over the cobblestones. The horses’ hooves echoed off the close old walls, and he’d call out to the tourists milling in the streets to stand back a beat before we all whizzed past. At one corner a family had rolled their baby’s stroller into the road, and he shouted, “Get off the street! It’s your child!” The three of us laughed and quoted him for the rest of the trip. “It’s your child!” You really shouldn’t count on HORSES to look out for your baby. They’re animals with free will. We spent about thirty minutes on the ride, with a stop by the river to feed and water the horse.

Other than one strawberry waffle, we ate Asian food the entire time we were in Belgium, which is extremely on brand for us. The city is famous for beer and chocolate, and Cody handled the beer while Skye and I handled the chocolate. Although, honestly, the endless chocolate shops all claiming to have the “best” chocolate, all seemingly made in the same factory, turned me off a little. It can’t all be the best, can it? It is all better than Hershey’s, I’ll give it that.

We also lost an unreasonable amount of time watching two men make hard candy. Mix and melt, cool and whip, roll it out, stretch it together, cut it into pieces, and repeat. An influencer was filming every step while one of the men narrated what he was doing, and I joked that we’d be able to spot ourselves in the background of her video someday, a little accidental souvenir of our trip.

Our hotel, The Chocolate Suites, sat right in the center of the old city in an old building with no reception desk and tiny, narrow staircases up to the third floor. The room was bigger than we expected and decorated, of course, in a donut-and-chocolate theme, with eight pieces of chocolate waiting for us. Skye’s favorite thing was opening the windows to peer down at the street and call “hello!” to the tourists before ducking out of sight.

After one long night, broken up by jet-lag TV and a few gentle shoves to stop Cody snoring, we all slept real, solid hours for the first time in days and woke up human again. I’m actually writing part of this on the train back to Amsterdam, which feels like a small miracle. The second leg on the way to Bruges had been canceled, so I had no idea if this train would run, or whether we’d even fit if it did. It ran. We got seats. On the way down we didn’t, and spent 2.5 hours sitting on the floor, so I don’t take a seat for granted anymore.

A lot of logistics came together to make that weekend happen, on no sleep for a nine-year-old and me, and after a long jet-lagged work week for Cody. I’m proud of us for not just playing it safe in Amsterdam. We’re a strong, curious, capable family, and the world tends to reward us for treating it that way, canceled trains and all.

I’ll add one strange thread from the weekend: we kept crossing paths with a Hare Krishna procession, first from our carriage, then in the main square, then down one street and another until it genuinely started to feel like they were following us. And on our first train out of Bruges, a crowd in red boarded our car with pro-Palestine signs and chanted for a good fifteen minutes. At the transfer in Brussels, whole trainloads of people in red were streaming toward what must have been a planned march. Cody and I have stumbled into demonstrations all over the world, from Bangkok to Paris to right there in Brussels, and back home in the US. We humans really do love to gather around a conflict.

Here’s the honest thing Bruges left me with, though. People here just aren’t as warm as they are back home. I told Cody, “I like Europe, I’ve loved our trips here, but it’s not Asia.” He said Europe isn’t foreign enough, and I think that’s part of it. In Vietnam we’d walk a residential street and nearly everyone would wave like they were thrilled to see us. Some of that is that we look foreign there, while here we blend in and nobody clocks us as visitors. But there’s a friendliness I associate with home that I felt the absence of. For maybe the first time, traveling made me sincerely glad to be American, to share a language and a culture, to live in this beautiful part of North America, and to come from a country that, for all its very real problems, largely makes room for other cultures and other people. That’s not a given everywhere, and we forget it.

The Anne Frank rollercoaster

We came to Amsterdam with basically one non-negotiable: the Anne Frank House. Skye and I had been reading Anne’s diary for weeks. And your travel-advisor mother, yes, me, never checked how to buy tickets. Sold out. For nearly six weeks. I broke the news to Skye and watched her deflate.

Then Cody heard about a resale site from his boss. I checked: yes! Tickets, 15:30 to 15:45. It was 15:30 exactly, and we were six minutes away with food we’d just been served at a Vietnamese restaurant. Could we make it? Should I buy them and ask the restaurant to box up our food? Time did that thing where it stretches and freezes. I decided it wasn’t enough time, told Skye, and watched her deflate all over again. We talked about coming back to Amsterdam someday. But it wouldn’t be the same, because we’re reading the diary NOW.

And then, just like that, two tickets popped up for 6:00 that evening. I tried to grab them and got an error. Again. Again. Again. I called Cody and begged him to try from his laptop. He couldn’t see the 6:00 slots, only 9:15 the next morning, but he managed to create an account, and the moment my cart released them, the 6:00 tickets appeared on his end and he bought them. Except now they read as the NEXT day at 6:00. Actually, one line said tonight and another said tomorrow. Skye and I walked straight to the entrance to ask, and an employee gently confirmed: tomorrow, and because we’d bought from a reseller there was nothing they could do. And you know what? I was thrilled. We had real, usable tickets to a place that had been sold out for weeks. We floated back to the hotel on cloud nine.

We saw it the next evening, at the end of what Skye called our “four museum” day, and it was special in a way I’m still holding carefully. Skye has known Anne’s story for years from a child’s version we’ve had forever, and when we found out we were coming, I bought her the full diary and we read half of it before the trip. She wanted to linger in every room and would have, if the quiet current of people moving through hadn’t carried us along. I told her that, who knows, through Cody’s family she might even be related to one of the families who hid in that annex. A few locals had told us the museum was “overrated.” Standing inside those rooms with my daughter, I could not disagree more. It isn’t Disney. It’s a privilege to walk through.

Four museums and a bus that wasn’t an Uber

That museum day earned its name. Skye started the morning at Cody’s office, meeting his coworkers and his boss and getting to see the inside of a corporate headquarters, which counted, in her ledger, as Museum 1. From there we did the Moco, the contemporary art museum, which was charming for its size even if it couldn’t quite thrill a kid who’s done Meow Wolf in three different cities and the Balloon Museum on top of that. Still, we stayed almost an hour, and seeing Banksy’s Girl with Balloon in person was worth it.

Then the Rijksmuseum, which every list swears is one of the best things to do in Amsterdam with kids, and which I could not for the life of me figure out on that front. I genuinely admire the skill in those old paintings and the window they give you into life centuries ago. But room after windowless room of battles, dead hunted animals, and religious torment, in the dark, with dark walls closing in, and I actually felt myself start to panic and had to stop and meditate to steady myself before we left. I spent too long in museums like that as a kid, and I suspect it’s part of why they don’t light me up now. I don’t want that for Skye, so we kept it short.

A couple of very Amsterdam lessons from those days, for anyone who follows in our footsteps: do not go out hungry before 6:00 p.m. Restaurants are constantly closed when Google swears they’re open, you need a reservation even at casual places because of how packed it gets, and lunch near our hotel was essentially a myth. We got turned away from one spot with people happily eating inside because they were “only open on Fridays, sorry!” It’s funny now. At the time, soaked from the rain and starving, it was not.

And I’m quietly proud of the bus. One day there were no Ubers to be had, so I navigated us onto a city bus using a janky, hand-drawn map from the hotel, and when I couldn’t decode the schedule at the stop, I asked a stranger for help. Small victory. Big feeling.

Windmills, wooden shoes and a mill on Mandø

Our last full day, Skye and I left Cody to work and took a bus tour out to the countryside: Zaanse Schans, Edam, Volendam and Marken. It was exactly the kind of day I needed, where someone else drives and leads and I get to switch my brain off a little and just enjoy it.

At Zaanse Schans we learned how windmills built old Netherlands, grinding spices and, crucially, pumping the water out of a country that’s a third marshland. We tasted cheese and watched traditional wooden shoes get carved, and the demonstrator handed Skye the sample clog for free and engraved it with her name and a windmill. I got a little emotional over that shoe. As a kid I begged my mom for wooden shoes like my Danish friends had, and she wouldn’t buy them because they were uncomfortable. Fair. I approve of her decision now, but I longed for a pair for years. And the windmills undid me a bit too, because my grandfather’s family, my Morfar’s people, ran a mill on the tiny Danish island of Mandø, where his parents are buried. I can’t wait to show Skye that windmill and try to count out loud exactly how many greats back her mill-running grandfather goes.

We had lunch with the guide and most of the bus in a packed restaurant called, straightforwardly, “Lunch,” while every other place on the street sat empty. Skye and I decided the guide probably eats free for gently steering everyone there and telling us the rest were no good. Then we walked around Marken, a little town near the water where the old houses have been restored to look exactly as they did when they were painted with tar hundreds of years ago.

I should mention the Uber ride out there, because Skye will never let me forget it. She had a sneezing fit, the driver cracked his window to circulate the air, and then she farted. In a stranger’s small car. I have never wanted a ride to end more in my life.

Going home

Amsterdam is unlike anywhere I’ve been, all those canals and impossibly narrow waterways, and I fell for its charm. We got outrageously lucky with the weather too, with only one of our five days rainy, and our guide swears the city gets only ten nice days a year. I don’t know if or when we’ll come back, but if we do, I’d stay outside the city in a rental with a kitchen, because eating was genuinely the hardest part. It’s expensive and rich, and hard to time, even when I’m just trying to order a salad.

What made this trip different was that Skye and I did so much of it as a team of two, without Cody. We took Ubers and buses on our own, found our own food, and figured out how to fill an afternoon. I’m always the one running the logistics, and it’s a comfort to have another adult around to problem-solve with. It’s a comfort, unfortunately but truly, to have a man beside you. But Skye is nine now, and she problem-solves, and she has this uncanny instinct for what to do and where to go. I find myself deferring to her logic more and more.

I teared up a dozen times on this trip. I’m so grateful for a life where I get to spend as many moments as possible with her, the special ones and the mundane ones both. She won’t always be right here beside me. But she is right now, and I’m doing my best to appreciate the greatest gift there is: her love.