I'm Leaving On a Jet Plane

Tomorrow is the day Travis and I start our European vacation! All the details are planned, concerns heard and prayers acknowledged. Yes, we've seen Brokedown Palace and Hostel and are aware of international law, but we appreciate the reminders :)

We start off with an overnight flight to Glasgow and from there we'll see some local attractions before freshening up before we head out to the Heineken Cup grand final at a local watering hole. We wanted to get tickets to see the final since it's being played in Edinburgh, but they were way out of our price range. Sigh. For Sunday, Travis put together a driving tour of nearby castles and I'm hoping it will be sunny enough to get a lot of great pics during the day. It's supposed to be around 56 degrees and rainy for both days, but the forecast looked better for Sunday (fingers crossed). I have a feeling it's going to look like this.

On Monday we head our for Amsterdam via KLM airlines (Royal Dutch Airlines, sounds fancy doesn't it?) and arrive late afternoon. Since virtually nothing is opened on Mondays, I have a feeling we are going to be getting a bit rowdy. I will say no more. We are staying in a dorm room at the Bulldog Hostel for the first 3 days of our trip and then in a private en suite room at hotel Freeland for the latter 3 days since we figured we would need a bit of privacy and a more relaxing atmosphere towards the end. I think the most anxious I felt during the planning process was when I was deciding on where we were going to stay during our travels. It's one thing to pick a place and then discover it sucks and having to deal with it by yourself and it's another to have to subject someone else to it as well. So basically I was nervous about picking sucky places and having Travis be disappointed. Then I realized it's an adventure and it would have to be fairly terrible for us not to see the humor in the situation so I'm much more relaxed now.

While in Amsterdam we plan on checking out the usual tourist haunts like the Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseumm, Anne Frank House, Heineken Brewery, and also do a tons of bike riding into the 'burbs, picnicking in the parks (beer, cheese, bread!), some dinners over in the Jordaan and possibly take in a concert at the Concertgebouw. I won't give you the details for each day as that will change depending on how good (or bad) we feel when we wake up in the morning, but we do have a plan, trust us :)

Overall, there really wasn't anything to planning this adventure, but that might be due to the fact that Trav and I are pretty laid back and we are going to wing it a bit. I did buy two guide books, a Rough Guide to Amsterdam and Frommer's 25 Great Drives in Scotland, to help us throughout the trip. We are going to find out very shortly if all our planning pays off!