My Passport’s Travels

It’s time to go home. Mom’s still on the mend, but we have a long travel day ahead. We put our bags out around 7:15 and when we left a few minutes later, they were already gone. We said our goodbye’s to Laura, who took good care of us and our stateroom all week and went for one last lovely breakfast. I will miss the peppered salami, peppered cream cheese and the fresh pineapple. We sat with a lovely couple and talked travel most of the meal.

Thanks to TheCruiseMaps.com for this great map of our cruise! They offer a free service where you can enter your cruise information and they track the exact path your ship took, provide statistics on your cruise history and display it on a map on their website. You can also purchase printable and downloadable versions of your cruise maps.

I had time for a few pictures of Amsterdam from the longboat.

Then they were calling our room number to let us know our cab was ready. By the time we made it down the dock, he had already grabbed our bags and loaded them up.

Most of the drive was through town – and it was lovely. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to stay on to explore. But glad to get closer to a windmill!

Once at the airport – it was interesting. You have to look on the departures board to see which line you check in at – our flight was at 26 and 27 (both of which had 8-10 terminals). But an agent stopped us and showed us the kiosks, which was much faster. You check in at the kiosk and print your boarding passes, then go to these machines to check your bag. You load the first piece of luggage in, scan your boarding passes and it pops out your bag tag – which is completely self-sticking. no peeling required! Then, you tell the machine the tag is on and it closes the front and slides the bag off and away to the airplane. It worked great for the first bag. But both of the other checked bags required help from the customer service agent, who had us on our way shortly. 

Then it was through security (which was extremely well organized and easy) and passport control – where we got our passports stamped again! We found our gate and I left Mom to go do a little bit of shopping. Thanks to the lovely shopkeeper at the cheese store who sent me with a little baggie of Gouda samples. Most importantly, I had a Yankee Spice coffee! (Pumpkin spice with oat milk – delicious!)

We have a little “two-er” set of seats on the flight to Philadelphia, which is just under 8 hours. The safety message was given first in English, then Dutch!

It’s strange – we started in daylight and flew into the dark and back into light. Mom read and I watched the first Wicked movie and read. Lunch was ok – chicken in marinara, mashed potatoes and steamed veggies, a salad, roll and lemon crumb cake.  A couple hours later, they came by with salted caramel ice cream! Yum!

More reading and about an hour before landing, the flight attendants brought us chicken Hot Pockets. We arrived in Philly, where Customs was a breeze (YEA Global Entry app!), we grabbed our bags and rechecked them and started the tromp across the airport. It must have been cold outside in PHL, because they had the heater on full blast! We made it to our gate with about 30 minutes to spare, loaded up for the last 3 1/2 hours of flight. It was a great trip – but it’s always good to come home.