Musings from Amsterdam

So, here I am sitting in the airport in Amsterdam waiting for my flight to Minneapolis. Here are some random tidbits.

First off, here's the snack I had on my KLM flight from Zurich to Amsterdam: "Antelope skewer and aged goat cheese offered with grilled courgette and beetroot potage." (As usual, I don't even know what most of that means.) For dessert, "ginger lime dessert served with caramel cream sauce." I'll say again that I love eating on airlines that aren't U.S. airlines. Try to imagine that menu on the last Delta flight you took.

Second, I'm sometimes struck by the insanity of all of this worldwide travel. It's about 12:30 p.m. as I'm writing this. My flight leaves Amsterdam at 2:30 p.m. I left the house at 7 this morning to haul my luggage down the stairs and then haul my luggage up the stairs to catch the bus that took me to the train that took me to the plane from Zurich to Amsterdam. When my plane to the Twin Cities finally pulls away from the gate in Amsterdam, I will have already been gone seven and a half hours. You'd think that's a pretty full day of travel, wouldn't you? Nope. In that time, I will have gone a grand total of about 350 miles, an average speed of worse than 50 miles per hour.

And the adventure is just beginning. I then get to sit in a metal box for nine and a half hours, seven miles above the ground or the ocean (in relatively comfortable conditions, granted). My reward at the end of this journey is to hope that my luggage made it with me, to face the scrutiny of a U.S. customs agent desperately looking for something interesting to happen, and then to get to bed at what my body considers to be around 6:00 the next morning, more than 24 hours after I woke up.

I'm not complaining. I knew what I was signing up for. I just sometimes marvel at how nuts it all is. Someone needs to invent a teleporter.

Third, Tanner and I have decided to take a quick trip back up to Paris over the holidays. We didn't get to experience Paris very much when we went to Disneyland earier this year. We're going to take three days to soak it up, visit the Louvre, visit Notre Dame, probably go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and just walk around. That's what's really fun about visiting a city, and that's what you don't get through the window of a tour bus. We'll be staying about a ten-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower. It should be a good time.