Wheels Up To Amsterdam

Hi! You’ve found your way to “Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman” and I am excited to meet you. Have you subscribed?

Photo by Matheo JBT on Unsplash

By the time anyone reads this post, I will not be in the US at all, but in Amsterdam! This will be our first international trip as a couple, and we are so eager to get started.

After regularly traveling in Europe in my early twenties, I’ve been USA-locked since 2018. A pandemic, a job change, buying a house, paying for a wedding, and settling into married life while working 50-60 hour work weeks accounts for some of that half-decade. The rest of it is because all our vacation time since getting married has been spent in long-promised visits to stateside friends, or cheaper, quieter road-trips thither and yon.

We’ve been planning this trip for a while but officially promised it to each other in the new year as a celebration for all the things: both of our thirtieth birthdays last year, a bit of our Christmas, all of our Valentine’s and anniversary gifts this year, and a celebration of my final chapter of my nannying days. It’s a big fat hurray to a dozen small moments besides. And using it as a blanket celebration for a handful of things makes the cost feel justified. Vacations can feel so cavalier to me. I did not grow up in a family that took vacations. We camped sometimes - locally - and one time in my twenties we took our first ever family vacation to Disney World that ended with a family tragedy back home. Suffice it so say, my family had fun in many ways, but we were quantifiably bad at vacations.

Andrew and I want to change this tradition of non-vacationing and yet to take a trip “just because” still feels so Versailles. I might as well be Marie Antoinette, mincing around on little court shoes for how ridiculous I feel writing Substacks about travel plans. But also? We work really, really hard. Life has handed out some draw fours and skips and reverses in the last year that we have navigated graciously. And we are taking a dang trip.

With this, I am trying to practice the art of stating travel plans and leaving them unjustified: we wanted to go and now, at last, we’re breaking away. I take it as an auspicious thing that the Euro and the American dollar are nearly equal at the very moment I finally get to skip the country again.

(Why do I get so uncomfortable at publicly valuing my leisure time, and putting money toward it? I have such a love/hate relationship with my all-American work ethic…this feels like something that would come up in counseling.)

Although we’ve known about our trip since early this year, somehow it escaped my notice for a while that I am the sole planner, the wagon master, if you will. Andrew is eager to accompany, but not so eager to be the one bushwhacking his way through avoiding tourist traps but seeing the good stuff, ferreting out great food, navigating a new transportation system, and making sense of the guidebook I insisted on purchasing. Those are skills that I am happy to offer. When I realized that I needed to activate this skill set for this trip, the perks of my dictatorship stood out:

• We go where I say. (and sometimes I say things like “I want to find this particular shop cat” and there can be no protest because I was told to plan everything.)

• I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a map of the city, which beefs up my naturally good sense of direction. I doubt we’ll get very lost - we have Google maps and the homing pigeon that lives behind my eyeballs.

• All the museum tickets are in one place: my email. They can’t get lost or shuffled around, and they’re all neatly settled in one tab labeled, AMSTERDAM TRIP/TICKETS because I need nothing if not explicit titles on my email tabs.

• I can explain all the stuff I personally insist on seeing as “things I know we will both enjoy.” There is an art to convincing the uninitiated that they really want to see the Hortus Botanicus because you’ve accidentally made a habit of seeing every major city’s botanical garden and now you can’t stop. Same with a museum of fossils.

• I can create a series of the best surprises for my travel partner - when you are the one who has read in-depth about your destination, it’s easy to seem weirdly good at discovering hidden treasures. I’m excited for this part.

Jokes aside, planning this trip has been a fun creative project for me. It has been a lesson not only in hearing the needs of the person I am married to, but of hearing the desires of the person I am traveling with for the first time. While I am content to skim along on apparent whims and flit from place to place as I want, he has a far better time in a new place if he has some expectation of what we will be doing. That and, “Can we make sure to see the Anne Frank house?” (yes, yes we can.)

Andrew is no stick in the mud. He is down for almost anything, he just prefers knowing about it beforehand. He is also risk-averse. My job over the past couple weeks has been to plan well enough that I can sort out for him what’s actually a risk (the Red Light District at night, pick-pockets, and bike accidents) from what’s not that risky (customs and layovers, trains and busses, dedicated ATMs, language barriers, new foods, museum hours, street navigation, etc.). In turn, he has handled all the plebeian business I don’t care for like negotiating an international phone plan, notifying our bank and cards that we’ll be traveling, and finding someone to hang out with our cat.

“But Rachel…you? Planning?” those who have concepts about me might say.

Okay, listen. There’s an unfair stereotype about people of my personality type (energetic, eager, fun, imaginative, sparkling, spontaneous, future-oriented types) that says we are not good at planning things. I think that’s the most bogus criticism: in fact, we have so many plans we could never accomplish them all. This is paired with a high level of flexibility because we get it, and are willing to drop things if we flew too close to the sun. It’s hard to communicate these antithetical traits to someone else, so it’s easier to say, “Just trust me, we’re going to have a great time.”

But loving each other well means that we work past what’s easiest. We learn how to communicate in ways that help the other person. “Just trust me” becomes a fairly detailed list of assurances.

Andrew is going to have to trust me about when to cross streets, about the fact that I know where I’m going even though I’ve never been here before, and that this train will lead us to The Hague, not an obscure village. I, in turn, have tried to plan well enough that our trip is purely distilled fun: not regimented, but sketched out to a calming extent.

If planning is his love language, I can do it well.

---

Dear Andrew:

You asked me to plan this trip and so I have. I know it’s your first for-fun international trip, and I want you to enjoy it to the fullest extent. If that means getting organized, just watch me, baby. I can do it!

First of all, I have rides to and from the D.C. airport sorted, as well as a place to crash on the return trip because neither of us will feel like driving four hours home. I bought really fun snacks for the plane, and higher protein snacks to fill in missing meals throughout the week (because the first rule of travel club is “never get hangry”). I have a box of chamomile tea in case jet lag keeps us up at night. I already researched how we’re supposed to stash and carry medications, and no they don’t have to go in checked luggage. I know exactly how many pounds our suitcases can be, and how to fill out the customs forms they’ll pass out on the flight home.

I remembered we need jackets in case it rains. I remembered to order plug adapters so we can charge our phones. I am thankful you’ve got narrow hips because I plan to use up, like, half your airplane seat. And if I need a seatbelt extender because airline seats are laughably tiny, I’ll make you ask for it. Sorry in advance. I love how excited you are for your first ever food on an airplane, even though I told you its weird. You can eat most of mine. I am never hungry unless it’s chocolate pudding or the time Turkish Air served baba ganoush. I also brought Dramamine and candied ginger, just in case turbulence gets the better of us.

To keep everything handy, I made a shareable Google Doc with a breakdown of our daily activities in two different font colors - the walking time between destinations are noted because we both know I say “it’s just up ahead” when I really mean probably five or six blocks; this way you know when I’m lying, but also you know that I didn’t suggest anything too crazy.

I asked for detailed instructions on what trains and busses to catch for specific destinations when necessary, so we know what we’re doing in the stations - I know you hate looking like a schlemiel, and so do I. (P.S. the train system works a lot like the Metro, and you can even buy tickets online). I already checked the weather and planned each day around it, and also advised packing choices accordingly. And because we love a good cappu, I have a pulse on the best coffee surrounding our planned activities - for your sake, I hope Europe does oat milk! I crowdsourced recommendations and now have nineteen different cool spots pinned on my maps app so that we can easily see which suggestions are close by if we have spare time; approximately twelve of them are pastry shops and the other ones are ice cream, a church, a brown bar, a women’s courtyard, and a miniscule cookie shop (respectively).

I have tickets to every museum we can’t just queue up at, and I know that none of them require face masks, but we packed ours just in case. I know where to buy sourdough, antique Delft ware, legal tulip bulbs, and cheese if we need it, and where to listen to jazz for free if we’re randomly awake at 10 PM on Tuesday night. Also the best company for a canal boat tour if we decide we want to do one. I won’t put you through a pedal-boat rental. I also won’t put you through the cat shelter on a houseboat, even though I kind of want to see what sixty floating cats looks like, but not enough to go there.

I have an actual suitcase full of things to bring to Shannon, including mayonnaise and salad dressing and all the chili peppers the Dutch don’t have, and some baby clothes and maybe shampoo and what looks like a small barge of Trader Joe’s taco seasoning which I hope doesn’t somehow resemble cocaine to TSA. It won’t - that was a joke.

We’re going to avoid Vondelpark at night so we don’t run into public sex. We’re going to figure out how not to get killed by bikes. Everyone is telling us we have to rent bikes but I literally cannot imagine trying to ride bikes with you while attempting to navigate and not get separated. We could end up hospitalized and that’s too risky, even for me, because if we are in hospital then that’s an end to our fun. And we’re going to have the most fun. Here’s a deal: if we find ourselves in some really quiet hour on some really quiet street and there happens to be some bike we just suddenly feel spurred onward to acquire…we can talk about it then. Everything is ready, and everything feels familiar because I’ve envisioned it all for so long! You can count on me, babe. I’ve got this.

Yours Securely And Without Incident,

Rache

(That means “I love you” in Plannish.)

---

Thank you, readers, for sharing our excitement surrounding this trip. I know it’s not always super exciting to hear about somebody else’s travels. However, I am eager to share recommendations of what I found helpful while planning, or things we did while there, if that’s something you’re interested in hearing! I didn’t want to do a “Here’s how we planned this trip” post yet because truthfully, it remains to be seen if this was a victory or not. I’ll report back on our return trip.

As always, thank you for reading Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman. This hungry woman is eating her way through The Netherlands at present, and pretty happy about it. Talk soon!