My Passport’s Travels

Welcome to our new adventure! This is our first cruise on Holland America – Rotterdam to Reykjavik! The report starts wordy, but I promise there will be tons of pictures!

Thursday, June 4, 2026

After almost two years of planning and waiting, it is finally time to pack! Bags everywhere around the house. While packing for us is generally controlled chaos, this time we layered in getting the house company clean before we left. Luke and Allison are going to be in town (so sad we missed seeing them) and our house will be their home base which gives Allison an office to work in during the week.

A few days earlier I received an email from Finnair about our flight home saying that the bag fees would be higher closer to the flight, so if we needed to pay for an extra bag, we should do it now. Which I did, without bothering to check the exchange rate on Icelandic Kroner, the currency they were charging me in. I get a message from my credit card company telling me the $183 charge had been processed! I paid for ONE extra bag! Thankfully, when I reached out to Finnair, they were able to quickly cancel the transaction and the refund settled a couple days later. Don’t make my mistake – always stop and check the exchange rate! (Which will be a lesson I did not learn, Iceland got me again at our first port!)

In the midst of all this, it was time to check in for our flight. And I got an error message. The information on Mom’s passport was not matching what they had in the system. I called American and the lady was very friendly, and found that I had somehow entered the wrong birth month. However, she said it could only be fixed at the airport the next day because they had to see the passport. She said there wouldn’t be any issues making that correction. (After the call, I checked with Claude to confirm we didn’t have anything to worry about – and it concurred!). Finally we crashed – tomorrow’s a big day.

Friday, June 5, 2026

Ugh… Why did I decide to work a half day? I mean, I know why, we don’t have to be at the airport until 12:30 – 1pm so why not save 4 hours PTO. But still, the morning was so long! Once I got off, though, things flew! Mom had been doing some last minute cleaning and packing all morning, but I still needed to do my wrap up. We finished up with 10 minutes to spare before Scott and Abigail arrived to take us to DFW.

After the stress of the checking in yesterday, it ended up taking a whole 20 minutes to get from drop off, through reservation correction (including a 5+ minute wait to get to an agent), bag drop and security.

Lesson learned: We were surprised that we didn’t have Touchless TSA marked on our boarding passes and initially wrote it off to the birthday fiasco, but when we asked the TSA Agent, he explained that we have to re-opt for every flight. I assumed that opting in at with the airline just set it for ever.

With 2 1/2 hours until boarding, we treated ourselves to a sit-down lunch at The Italian Kitchen by Wolfgang Puck. We shared roasted Brussel sprouts as an appetizer (so good!) and I had the Italian pizza (thin crust with salami, soppressata, and pepperoncinis – amazing!). Mom had the meatball sub, they used pesto instead of tomato sauce, which is unusual – but she had a slice of my pizza to make up for it! Even with the meal, we had about an hour before boarding – but we played on our phones and people-watched. (The elderly European couple that sat across from us showed up with 4 McDonald’s caramel sundaes – they each enjoyed 2 before boarding! I wonder if that’s not something they have in Europe?)

It’s time! Boarding is underway. We made our way to our handpicked row of our Boeing 777 – the only row in economy that wasn’t a bulkhead row and had only 2 seats. We knew going in that the seats wouldn’t recline because they were in front of a lavatory, but felt that was a trade off worth making on such a long flight. But these were small seats, and the distance between rows felt small (although that might be because our last few AA flights have been in extra legroom seats). We make it through the flight though! All of the announcements were given in both English and Dutch. Dinner was, dinner – we both opted for the pasta (corkscrew in tomato sauce) and really enjoyed the wedge of Gruyère. I did figure out that if I sat the roll on top of the plastic covering the pasta for a couple of minutes, it took the chill off. So while I waited for that, I held the almost frozen butter in my hands. Voila! Easy to spread butter on a warm(ish) roll. They included a fudge brownie with cinnamon for dessert.

Saturday, June 6, 2026

At some point mid-flight, the day changed. Sadly, neither of us could get comfortable so we didn’t get much sleep, but we had a little breakfast on the plane – yogurt with granola and a fig newton bar. And after cabin cleanup from breakfast, the wonderful inflight crew immediately went into preparation for landing and we touched down 20 minutes early in Amsterdam!

At DFW, when you arrive internationally, you’re basically sequestered from the departing passengers until you go through Customs and Immigration, so I was surprised when we got off the plane right into the main terminal – but I finally realized, I don’t believe there are any domestic flights landing in Amsterdam. The three major airports are all within an hour or so drive of each other. Everyone gets to go through Customs and Immigration!

The new EU entry process went into effect earlier this year, and although there have been horror stories of multi-hour waits for processing, we walked up to the Star Wars-looking machines without any wait, scanned our passports (Mom had to supply her fingerprints as well), then were assigned to Path 2 – where we only had one party in front of us to talk to the agent. I prefer to think he asked so many questions about our trip because he was excited for us, although I do understand it’s actually data he’s gathering for their tracking system.

By the time we made it through our bags were already on the carousel. We quickly found the Holland America representative who walked us to a waiting area while the others on our bus were making their way out. (It’s a good thing I didn’t know there was a bakery around the corner – who knows what all I would have been taking to the hotel!). Once everyone was ready, we followed the representative out to our bus for the hour-long ride to Rotterdam. We saw lots of windmills, both traditional and modern, acres and acres of greenhouses and a herd of Red Belted Galloway cows! I couldn’t get my own picture fast enough, but aren’t they interesting?

We arrived at the DoubleTree by Hilton Rotterdam Centre around 10:30 (which is amazing since we landed around 8am), checked our bags at the front desk and headed out to explore the neighborhood.

Hotel review: https://mypassportstravels.com/2026/06/20/doubletree-by-hilton-rotterdam-centre/

The hotel is right on the Maas river and across the bridge from the cruise port. The bridge is closed to automobile traffic because of road construction, but the city trams, bikes (sooo many bikes in The Netherlands) and foot traffic are welcome. About halfway across the bridge, there was a staircase leading down to the Spido tour dock. (Isn’t the bike ramp on the steps cool?) We were able to snag tickets for the 11am tour, literally stepping on board as they closed the gangplank behind us.

We grabbed sausage-filled puff pastries from the snack bar, made our way forward and found window seats on the right side, which the snack bar attendant recommended because all of the narration was scripted for the right side of the boat (it is an out and back tour, rather than a circle tour).

Honestly, we couldn’t hear well, and we were exhausted. So not much was learned, despite a ton of information being shared. The two main factoids I retained were:

• The Netherlands the world’s leading exporter of cut flowers and
• Rotterdam is the arrival point of much of the South American fruit coming to Europe (Brazilian orange juice was called out specifically).

The arrow is pointing at our hotel from the river side!

The first (and eventually) last 15 minutes of the tour were through pretty parts of town. The middle 40 minutes was through the working harbor of container ships.

I loved the sculpture of a fishing man in the second picture, but he was hard to photograph.

On the way back in, we did detour down a little side stream to cruise past the original Rotterdam cruise ship! She sailed between The Netherlands and America from 1958-1972. Today she’s permanently docked and lives on as a hotel, restaurant and wine bar. We met a family later in the week who stayed there before the cruise and said it was great.

We also sailed past the original Holland America office building.

Back ashore, we were both dragging. I stopped at a little coffee kiosk for some caffeine and we made our way back to the hotel – fingers crossed that our room would be ready early. It was not. So we sat in the lobby and enjoyed the view down a canal – including these crazies in some sort of motorized tub who jumped in and went swimming! We were also right next to a water taxi stand.

An 1 1/2 hours later, Sira from the front desk came to find us because our room was finally available! She was so sweet – she had come by about halfway through the wait to offer us a different type of room that would be available right away. (We decided to hold out for two queens instead of a king.) Sira gave us our keys and a letter from Holland America detailing the transfer process

We were so glad we decided to wait for our original room type. She got us a beautiful corner room on the 9th floor with stunning views of the Maas and Erasmus bridge on one side and the city on the other!

Excuse the orange reflections from the room’s lighting, please!

I broke my cardinal rule of jet lag prevention – I took a nap. We were both shot and the 2 hours perked us up wonderfully! We also realized we were starved (it was a small sausage pastry earlier and even the warm cookie at check in had worn away). Downstairs in the hotel was Do All Day, a sweet little bistro with huge windows and a great view of the river. While the Schnitzel was flavorful, it was a little tough. But the slaw was great. And the desserts! Made to order cream filled donuts! Mom enjoyed the Biscoff and I had the Stroopwafel and we both felt we had the better option of the two.

After a leisurely dinner we went back to the room to repack for the cruise and were in bed around 9pm. Tomorrow’s an early-ish day, bags have to be out by 8am!

Trip Report Index
* Thursday – Saturday, June 4-6, 2026 – Flight over and Rotterdam 
Sunday June 7, 2026 – Embarkation day
Monday June 8, 2026 – Day at Sea** Tuesday June 9, 2026 – Invergorden, Scotland
Wednesday June 10, 2026 – Day at Sea
Thursday June 11, 2026 – Seydisfjördur, Iceland
Friday June 12, 2026 – Akureyri, Iceland
Saturday June 13, 2026 – ľsafjörður, Iceland
Sunday – Monday, June 14-15, 2026 – Reykjavik, Iceland and Helsinki, Finland