Bob and I don't have our bags yet -- but we're having a Heineken in Amsterdam, what more do we need?

First impressions

Bicycles

Bicycles

Bicycles

Streaming along with the traffic

The smart cars, the little euro machines

Basic bikes, clunkers, nothing fancy

No gears, but no need,

Not a hill in Holland

Some with push carts on the front

Filled with kids, dogs, groceries

little minivans

a young woman pedals hard, three kids aboard

a businessman in a suit flies by, he’s texting with one hand

a guy carries his date on the back, she rides sidesaddle

dreaming of the night ahead


Bob and I, travel weary, but with a second wind

Are in a brasserie drinking Heinekens

Listening to a motley mix

From Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl to

Bollywood dance music

To a Dutch rendition of Girl from Ipanema

In front of us a young couple smartly dressed

Smoke and laugh, the air sparkles with their joy

Their excitement for one another

The waiters are Hollywood gorgeous

They flirt with the girl

While steps away in the street

Bikes whisk by

Look, there goes a woman in a party dress balancing a bouquet of fresh flowers

On the handlebars

We’re not in Rapid City anymore.

I love this city -- and we're not even out of the airport!

row 56, E and F...

Denver to Frankfurt to Amsterdam

On the long flight I read USA Today, three chapters of The Terror, (Dan Simmons), watched High School Musical III (again, I confess, and mostly for the fabulous choreography. In a parallel life I’m a dancer.)

I also watched Twilight for the first time. (My first husband was a vampire of sorts, so I related to Bella and I thought maybe the reason Edward can’t read her mind is because there’s not much to be read at this point in her life… I can see why teens love this film, and I confess I thought the vampires were all pretty hot, but this is a dangerous movie for girls. More on this, later.)

Bob and I were sitting across the aisle from one another, but knowing absence makes the heart grow fonder, we dealt with it. (We dated for six years before we married; I lived in Denver and he lived 30 miles away in Boulder, which almost counts as a long distance relationship.) Bob wasn’t too lonely, since he was sitting next to a beautiful young German girl, on his right hand side, though she was a sleeping beauty. Which he’d pick over a chatty cathy any day.

It was nearly a ten-hour flight from Denver to Frankfurt, our first stop and port of entry into the EU. Lufthansa treats you pretty good, even way back at the butt end of the bus. We were given the hot towels to wipe hands and faces, free drinks and two complementary hot meals. The flight attendants were all tall and striking; they transformed the aisle into a fashion runway each time they came striding down with a drink cart.

Bob set aside his study of optics for this vacation, and brought along some frivolous reading (The White Company, an obscure novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a young man raised in a monastery who ends up fighting in the Hundred Years War with France.) He also had his book of New York Times crosswords, which he carries around like the New Testament.

From Frankfurt it was a short hop to Amsterdam. Looking down from the plane, there sure is a lot of water in this country. Looks like they should be growing rice instead of tulips…

Twenty-one hours after leaving Adam’s house, we’re in Holland! I haven’t slept a wink, and I’m not about to now, baby!

our adventure -- day 1 -- we get as far as Rapid City...

Bob has a ton of "free miles" he's earned flying United Airlines, so we decided to cash some of them in on a "free" trip to Amsterdam. Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.

Because we were using miles, they routed us from Denver to Rapid City, South Dakota, to Chicago, to Amsterdam.

Well, here we sit in a bar in the Rapid City airport, our flight to Chicago was cancelled, and there' no more flights to Chicago until tomorrow. So we'll fly back to Denver, then to Frankfurt, then to Amsterdam.

We'll get there, eventually. Meanwhile, there's always something of interest, no matter where you find yourself. Check out those fossils from the Black Hills...

It's always an adventure with you, dear

Travels with Bob

Belem, Borneo, Bora-Bora

Oh, I'd go anywhere with you, dear

By sail, by silver wing, or hiking shoe

Road trip you say?

I'm ready, let's go

Let's pack it up

And light out again

lsc/4/13/07

Bob's 61st birthday and we're off to Amsterdam and Belgium for 2 weeks, our first trip in several years. The occasion? Bob's birthday, his health, and the one-year anniversary of our kidney transplant, coming up on April 24.

This is a Smithsonian Journeys tour, Waterways of Holland and Belgium, aboard the M.V. Casanova, (which is sure to be a far cry from Topaz, our 36 foot sloop in the picture... In the first place, aboard Topaz, I am the crew. First Mate, cook, ship surgeon, cabin girl, laundress, you name it. Yes, Captain Bob lends a hand with the menial chores.)

Compared to most of our travels in the past, this might sound like a rather staid, old-people's vacation, but traveling with Bob is always an adventure.

What am I most looking forward to? Rembrandt, Vermeer, spring tulip fields, port towns with their smell of the sea, and boats, ships from all over the world? Delftware, dikes, windmills, canals, coffee houses, really cool old buildings in medieval cities? Not cooking or cleaning up for two weeks?

There are an infinite number of ways to see and know a place, any place. Maybe I'll do a little time-traveling and write you from another era. Stay tuned. It's all about the discovery.

Come by for a piece of Aunt Suzie's yellow cake

Aunt Suzie's 1-2-3-4 cake

1 cup shortening (or butter) 1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups sugar 2 tsp. baking powder
3 cups flour 1 tsp. salt
4 eggs 1 cup milk

Mix flour and baking soda in bowl and set aside. Cream shortening, salt, and sugar. Add eggs. Add vanilla. Add flour and baking powder mixture. Add milk. Bake in greased and floured tube pan at 325. Bake for 1 hour, or until cake springs back when touched lightly.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about the yellow cake my Aunt Suzie used to make, and Shazam! Just like that, through the magic of the Internet I had the recipe! (Thanks to my cousins on Facebook...) Turns out, it's a 1-2-3-4 cake, which dates back to the 19th century, according to Susan G. Purdy, author of Pie in the Sky, a high altitude cookbook.

Today I made the cake in honor of Easter, Bob's upcoming birthday -- and in honor of Aunt Suzie, whose real name is Clara Collison Leister but everybody calls her Suzie, or just Suze. I hope to visit her and all my Maryland cousins, second and third cousins this summer. And if she knows I'm coming, she might make this cake...

When I think of Aunt Suzie's kitchen back in Pasadena, Maryland, I think of this yellow cake iced with chocolate, I think of a big bowl of homemade potato salad, and I think of a pitcher of sweetened iced tea in the refrigerator. They always had iced tea, year-round. Oh, and I remember her crab cakes, oh yeah. (We'll have to blog that one later.) I can hear her yelling at barking, tail-wagging Baron who always came crashing through the screen door behind us.

There are many variations to the 1-2-3-4 cake, and I adjusted mine for altitude, since I baked it at 7,000 feet. I was going to ice it with chocolate like I remember Aunt Suzie's cakes being iced. Then I found half a bag of coconut in the cupboard and half a package of cream cheese in the 'fridge, so I decided on a butter-cream cheese icing sprinkled with toasted coconut instead. And in the middle of the two layers I put raspberry jam that I made last year when raspberries were super cheap at City Market. (Not to get too Martha Stewart on you.) Actually, I have only made jam once in my life, not counting when my mother made me help her.

My mother used to make jams and jellies every year out of all kinds of fruits growing on our farm; like elderberry, blackberry, and rhubarb. Delicious, but so time consuming! I mean why make jam, right? It's so cheap to buy. And why bake cakes, especially from scratch?

Seriously, I'd rather be writing. Or reading. Or sailing. Or planning a trip to Paris. But once in a while I like to make something from scratch, the old-fashioned way, I don't know why. It's kind of like remembering with my hands. It feels like I'm honoring my forebears and the people in my life who mattered, and who still matter.

And then, I get to eat it. Which is how you can have your cake and eat it too.

Life is terminal

(Bob and I with a level 3 AFF student, in the early 1990's, over Skydive Colorado.)


Let go of everything you think you know

Let go of your imagined self, watch it grow smaller

as it plummets toward the inevitable


Let go of life, yes, that too

Feel the air flowing between your fingers

Stretching the skin of your face

into a grin


Seconds left to live

All the time in the world

All you’ll ever need


fall
free
just
let

go


lsc/revised 4/8/09