Lost
Amsterdam is not an easy city. Founded in 1275 (a date nearly unfathomable to Americans) this cold watery little city probably didn't anticipate on becoming a massive tourist destination and I think their narrow cobbled alleys and crooked roads with changing names really proves that point. While looking at a map it seems easy enough with roads lining the canals, but closer inspection shows seemingly random courtyards and forks in the road all devoid of "navigational landmarks" as Cass kept repeating due to every building being relatively short. There are no "high points" from which to view and there are a repeat of shops and restaurants on every corner so that when you walk into one Old Amsterdam Cheese store and begin to weave back to your hotel you'll walk into another Old Amsterdam Cheese store and wonder did you just walk in a circle? How did that happen? Is this just another store by the same name or is this literally the same store? That 44 inch dildo doesn't look familiar next door, however to my left the AutoBlow 2000 proudly displayed in the store front does.
You'll ponder all this staring at the sex and cheese shops only to be amazed that while you are surrounded by tourists, only you and your sister seem to be lost staring at maps. Perhaps many of the tourist are content to stumble from one Coffee House (where they sell weed) to the next never really making their way back to their hotel. You could wander around all night enjoying hedonistic pleasures, but trying to make your way to a hotel or museum was much more difficult, particularly the smaller museums and hotels located on one of those hidden streets.
Suffice it to say we got lost. A lot. We spent more time lost than found. Without Cass I think I would have resorted to prostitution to get a bed because at no point was I able to find the hotel. Not once. She had spent one evening out walking finding her "navigational landmarks" (known as just regular old landmarks to everyone else) deducing that "the train station where the architecture changed" was our best navigation pointer towards our hotel. Every time we walked around beyond that point we clung to that train station marker. The train station is right on the largest body of water and is ever so slightly taller than the other buildings so it stood out more than the rest. That being said it still was not always easy to find, especially when you're tired of walking.
The one time I came in handy in the city of Amsterdam was the day Cass had a melt down. Her back was injured, she hadn't eaten, she was rightly tired of walking. While I'm a raging bitch most days, she's more picky. I didn't have any snacks packed that day. Our Holland Passes weren't working (turns out it was a system issue) and you can read my other blog to see how helpful the staff of the Holland Pass booking booths and citizens were around us (Spoiler the Holland Pass staff was about as useful as a pair of stilletos on an ice rink and about as friendly as a hungry bull shark). We had walked several miles already that day only to be turned down at our free tours due to our broken Holland Passes. At that point her brain turned to mush. I recognized where we had walked and knew the map well enough to know we had never been in this area before. It wasn't near any canal so we hadn't even ridden through it via boat and no bus route went through it. It was miles from our hotel. Cass was insistent she knew where she was. I was insistent she just trust me this once, she was wrong.
I'll be honest, I didn't have a great track record with maps up until this point. One day we rented a car and drove all over the Netherlands based on a dumb-asses direction. Again the tourist guides were useless and equally as clueless as the tourists themselves. Even locals when asked rarely knew exactly where something was. The man at Enterprise sent us driving to a quaint little town called Geithoorn. (Quick review of this place is its absolutely adorable and very worth visiting)
We told the Car Rental clerk we were trying to go to Kinderdijk, a field of old windmills that was recommended. He said "oh wonderful, have you thought about this little village with small canals, it's on the way, let me Google the name." We should have seen the red flag when it took him ages to Google the town "on the way." Eventually he found the name, Geithoorn.
Cass had read about this place and it seemed lovely. We said oh that's perfect. We popped it into the navigation system and went on our way. At one point on route, the ultra polite nav system that took too long to spit out directions and we missed an exit. The Dutch seem to be fond of the eco-friendly option of simply not using street signs marking north or south. "Would you please so kindly if it benefits you consider possibly moving over to exit in the right lane" the nav system spoke making us miss the exit all together because we had already driven by before she announced the exit. It didn't re-routed us saying we didn't have to exit after all and we just went with it. We drove through Rotterdam which made us happy, we knew that was near Kinderdijk so we must have been properly on our way. The drive was about 2 hours more than made sense but we arrived in Geithoorn and had a wonderful time. We didn't even realize yet how lost we had been.
We rented a small motor boat to drive the canals of the picturesque town. They gave us a simple wooden map. You go down to the end of the main town canal and take a left. You then take a right, another right along a lake, a right to turn back into the canals, and then a final right, completing your little square route and arrive back at the main canal. The rental was for an hour, plenty of time to complete the square path. I at first mocked Cass for her caution driving the boat slowly down the canal driving where she cautiously waited for a larger tour boat to pass by waiting on the side of the canal for several minutes for the slow boat to pass. She claimed they were hard to steer. I scoffed like a know it all. A bit later once we had turned left she allowed me to drive. I hit every wall of the canal alternating sides. Left wall, right wall, ram into a bridge support, get caught and have to pole my way out. It culminated when there was a group of school children walking down the canal waving at us all of four feet away while I wedged the boat horizontally into the canal. I stopped driving and let Cass take the helm again like Captain Ahab navigating expertly through the canals.
My job as ship navigator was to tell Cass when to turn, however the small wooden map was really mostly just a picture of a square and it indicated markers along the canals that absolutely did not exist. Cass agreed and we saw some markers but the map would say turn at marker 2 and yet there was no number 2. There was an "A" followed by a "9" then "4" then another "9" but nothing was sensibly marked ( a trend). We cruised down the canal past adorable houses and under small arched bridges that connected the neighbors to each other. It was adorable to think you couldn't reach your next door neighbor without crossing 3 moss covered wooden bridges that looked straight out of a British Romance novel where a man would propose in the foggy rain. We went under bridge after bridge, each one getting lower and lower above the water until Cass and I were having to duck into the boat to properly go through safely. We went under about 25 bridges until we reached the edge of the canal as it curved around and began to meander through a farm with ancient looking metal windmills.
At this point we had been wandering why we hadn't turned yet, though we had no indication that we should have. Our hour was closing in to complete for our boat rental. It was cold, though thankfully sunny which was our saving grace throughout the boat trip, otherwise we would have been miserable. I told Cass to step on it and accelerate our way into the lake, which we were supposed to have finished by this time. After going full speed through the lake for about 30 minutes trying to identify where the hell we were in the lake to no avail we spotted a restaurant on the lake. A restaurant we were supposed to have passed on our original path. The restaurant was completely hidden from the canals and there is no way we would have seen it in any capacity to have known to turn. When we got to that point we saw several other rental boats in other colors popping out from canals into the lake at their appropriate turns. Dicks. Finally, 30 minutes late for our rental return we saw a red canal boat, the same color as our own. It was one of the guided tours. Cass followed behind the boat only for us to realize it was incredibly slow and took up the entire canal. We finally made it back to our drop off point about an hour late which should have cost an additional 35 euro. We had gone under about 25 bridges, apparently on the map it showed going under 4...
We scooted out of dodge before we got charged a late fee and hopped in the car to route to Kinderdijk. Two hours. The navigation system said to drive there was two hours. What the hell we thought, this place was supposed to be on the way. We thought screw it, we would get there late and potentially miss the closing time of the windmills (though you could still walk up to them, just not in) and drove on. After an hour and a half we passed Rotterdam. Rotterdam, a city we had driven through already. How far out of the way was this place you may be wondering... Well here is the map of how the Enterprise clerk sent us.
You'll ponder all this staring at the sex and cheese shops only to be amazed that while you are surrounded by tourists, only you and your sister seem to be lost staring at maps. Perhaps many of the tourist are content to stumble from one Coffee House (where they sell weed) to the next never really making their way back to their hotel. You could wander around all night enjoying hedonistic pleasures, but trying to make your way to a hotel or museum was much more difficult, particularly the smaller museums and hotels located on one of those hidden streets.
Suffice it to say we got lost. A lot. We spent more time lost than found. Without Cass I think I would have resorted to prostitution to get a bed because at no point was I able to find the hotel. Not once. She had spent one evening out walking finding her "navigational landmarks" (known as just regular old landmarks to everyone else) deducing that "the train station where the architecture changed" was our best navigation pointer towards our hotel. Every time we walked around beyond that point we clung to that train station marker. The train station is right on the largest body of water and is ever so slightly taller than the other buildings so it stood out more than the rest. That being said it still was not always easy to find, especially when you're tired of walking.
The one time I came in handy in the city of Amsterdam was the day Cass had a melt down. Her back was injured, she hadn't eaten, she was rightly tired of walking. While I'm a raging bitch most days, she's more picky. I didn't have any snacks packed that day. Our Holland Passes weren't working (turns out it was a system issue) and you can read my other blog to see how helpful the staff of the Holland Pass booking booths and citizens were around us (Spoiler the Holland Pass staff was about as useful as a pair of stilletos on an ice rink and about as friendly as a hungry bull shark). We had walked several miles already that day only to be turned down at our free tours due to our broken Holland Passes. At that point her brain turned to mush. I recognized where we had walked and knew the map well enough to know we had never been in this area before. It wasn't near any canal so we hadn't even ridden through it via boat and no bus route went through it. It was miles from our hotel. Cass was insistent she knew where she was. I was insistent she just trust me this once, she was wrong.
I'll be honest, I didn't have a great track record with maps up until this point. One day we rented a car and drove all over the Netherlands based on a dumb-asses direction. Again the tourist guides were useless and equally as clueless as the tourists themselves. Even locals when asked rarely knew exactly where something was. The man at Enterprise sent us driving to a quaint little town called Geithoorn. (Quick review of this place is its absolutely adorable and very worth visiting)
We told the Car Rental clerk we were trying to go to Kinderdijk, a field of old windmills that was recommended. He said "oh wonderful, have you thought about this little village with small canals, it's on the way, let me Google the name." We should have seen the red flag when it took him ages to Google the town "on the way." Eventually he found the name, Geithoorn.
Cass had read about this place and it seemed lovely. We said oh that's perfect. We popped it into the navigation system and went on our way. At one point on route, the ultra polite nav system that took too long to spit out directions and we missed an exit. The Dutch seem to be fond of the eco-friendly option of simply not using street signs marking north or south. "Would you please so kindly if it benefits you consider possibly moving over to exit in the right lane" the nav system spoke making us miss the exit all together because we had already driven by before she announced the exit. It didn't re-routed us saying we didn't have to exit after all and we just went with it. We drove through Rotterdam which made us happy, we knew that was near Kinderdijk so we must have been properly on our way. The drive was about 2 hours more than made sense but we arrived in Geithoorn and had a wonderful time. We didn't even realize yet how lost we had been.
We rented a small motor boat to drive the canals of the picturesque town. They gave us a simple wooden map. You go down to the end of the main town canal and take a left. You then take a right, another right along a lake, a right to turn back into the canals, and then a final right, completing your little square route and arrive back at the main canal. The rental was for an hour, plenty of time to complete the square path. I at first mocked Cass for her caution driving the boat slowly down the canal driving where she cautiously waited for a larger tour boat to pass by waiting on the side of the canal for several minutes for the slow boat to pass. She claimed they were hard to steer. I scoffed like a know it all. A bit later once we had turned left she allowed me to drive. I hit every wall of the canal alternating sides. Left wall, right wall, ram into a bridge support, get caught and have to pole my way out. It culminated when there was a group of school children walking down the canal waving at us all of four feet away while I wedged the boat horizontally into the canal. I stopped driving and let Cass take the helm again like Captain Ahab navigating expertly through the canals.
My job as ship navigator was to tell Cass when to turn, however the small wooden map was really mostly just a picture of a square and it indicated markers along the canals that absolutely did not exist. Cass agreed and we saw some markers but the map would say turn at marker 2 and yet there was no number 2. There was an "A" followed by a "9" then "4" then another "9" but nothing was sensibly marked ( a trend). We cruised down the canal past adorable houses and under small arched bridges that connected the neighbors to each other. It was adorable to think you couldn't reach your next door neighbor without crossing 3 moss covered wooden bridges that looked straight out of a British Romance novel where a man would propose in the foggy rain. We went under bridge after bridge, each one getting lower and lower above the water until Cass and I were having to duck into the boat to properly go through safely. We went under about 25 bridges until we reached the edge of the canal as it curved around and began to meander through a farm with ancient looking metal windmills.
At this point we had been wandering why we hadn't turned yet, though we had no indication that we should have. Our hour was closing in to complete for our boat rental. It was cold, though thankfully sunny which was our saving grace throughout the boat trip, otherwise we would have been miserable. I told Cass to step on it and accelerate our way into the lake, which we were supposed to have finished by this time. After going full speed through the lake for about 30 minutes trying to identify where the hell we were in the lake to no avail we spotted a restaurant on the lake. A restaurant we were supposed to have passed on our original path. The restaurant was completely hidden from the canals and there is no way we would have seen it in any capacity to have known to turn. When we got to that point we saw several other rental boats in other colors popping out from canals into the lake at their appropriate turns. Dicks. Finally, 30 minutes late for our rental return we saw a red canal boat, the same color as our own. It was one of the guided tours. Cass followed behind the boat only for us to realize it was incredibly slow and took up the entire canal. We finally made it back to our drop off point about an hour late which should have cost an additional 35 euro. We had gone under about 25 bridges, apparently on the map it showed going under 4...
We scooted out of dodge before we got charged a late fee and hopped in the car to route to Kinderdijk. Two hours. The navigation system said to drive there was two hours. What the hell we thought, this place was supposed to be on the way. We thought screw it, we would get there late and potentially miss the closing time of the windmills (though you could still walk up to them, just not in) and drove on. After an hour and a half we passed Rotterdam. Rotterdam, a city we had driven through already. How far out of the way was this place you may be wondering... Well here is the map of how the Enterprise clerk sent us.
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| Yes. That's right. Instead of re-routing us the GPS took us from Amsterdam, missed a turn about 10 minutes in, so it sent us to Rotterdam, no signs indicating we were traveling south, then sent us up to Giethoorn, our actual destination. After a three hour tour, a three hour tour, we made it back to the car and began our destination to Kinderdijk. The place the Enterprise man had said was "on the way." If on the way mean the complete opposite direction by two hours. By the time we toured Kinderdijk we though eh 'fuck it' and decided to embrace our lostness and excessive driving and drove through the city of Delft which had some very cute architecture but was practically abandoned and then through the Hague to see the Peace Palace before returning to Amsterdam. |
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| Our actual path took about 7 hours, if the GPS had re-routed it would have taken 5 hours and if we had planned a circular path we could have done it in even less. Suffice it to say we spent a day lost, though it was beautiful. Certainly more beautiful than being lost in shops of silicon vaginas and penis vacuums.
In Kinderdijk I parked in the wrong guest parking spot at the windmills which was marked "Parking" and was promptly barked at by yet another kindhearted local. Cass took pictures forever and I lost her at one point and we paid to pee because again its Amsterdam. Peeing is a privilege, not a right even when you've already paid admissions.
It seemed for the most part that Cass and I really were the only lost people throughout the trip until we saw a couple at the Jewish Heritage Museum. For whatever reason, the Jewish sector of Amsterdam seemed extra secure. Perhaps the remaining Jews are weary of the Dutch stealing more of their art and claiming robbers keepers when the Jews, with proof of ownership, request it back. They're right to be weary. Or maybe they're just more secure, I'm not sure, but at the museum there was a security exit door. It clearly said Exit Only in English and Dutch. The doors act as a trap with two set of doors forming a door box. You exit the museum and a door closes behind you so you can't re-enter. Once the door has closed behind you, the outdoor door will unlock and open so you may exit outside. This is similar technology used by many airports. The lost couple walked through the incorrect Exit door (which again had giant arrows pointing them away from that door) and stepped inside. However the interior doors would not open for them. The exterior doors would trigger to reopen, hoping they'd catch a hint and leave, though they remained inside willing the interior doors to the museum to open. It wasn't going to open. The couple turned and made frantic movements. People walking by the glass doors tried to talk to them and show them to the proper entrance, but the morons stayed put dancing in front of the doors hoping for them to open. Minutes were passing and they were being waved at by many people to exit and go to the entrance. Meanwhile no one inside the museum could exit. You could see their shadows waiting impatiently at the interior exit doors. A thick line was forming. On and on this went for about 5-10 minutes until the interior doors opened. The couple walked in relieved while a flood of exiting guests rushed out of the museum only to be promptly shown out by security and pointed to the actual entrance.
So it wasn't just Cass and I, and the couple certainly seemed worse than anything we had done. We at least had the pride to carry on and drive two extra hours or speed through a lake a 3mph rushing back through a giant lake acting like we had meant to spend an extra hour out in the freezing cold. We weren't about to hang around looking like monkeys discovering tools and automatic doors.
It was the last day of traveling when Cass had her meltdown. I had come in handy the previous road trip day finding a church based off of it's height and navigating our way back and I was handy again this day. Despite her insistence the train station was behind us and she had been there before, I knew it was in the direction I was dragging her. There was a sign for a train station in the direction she was pointing, but I said there must be another one somewhere in the city, it was not ours. We popped into a little tourist booth and looked at the map and I asked the man the direction of the train station. He pointed in my direction. Cass brought up the other sign. He said there was another station. She said "but behind us is the canal where the boat goes, I've been there" he showed her there was no water. I was right. And that's what this blog is really about. I was right.
But she was right every other time and managed to not get a boat stuck in a canal or resort to prostitution for a bed because she couldn't find the hotel, and managed to find every little niche bakery on the must go to lists. And she pretty much planned out everything we were supposed to do from Day 1: top to bottom. Hotels, activities, food, train times. She did it all. But just once I knew where the train station was. Hah.
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