Tagging Along on a Work Trip: 9 - Hour Layover in Amsterdam

  Our plans for Hawaii had long been solidified when Glen came home from work one day talking about a work conference that had recently popped up on his schedule that would be held in Barcelona.  We hadn't left the country in 2-1/2 years (#thankscovid) and my wanderlusting soul really hoped that it would be okay for me to tag along too!    We were a little nervous about the timing...we'd literally be home for 3 days before taking off for Hawaii, but somehow  we pulled all the details together (including expediting my passport renewal) and we got to go on a relatively spontaneous and inexpensive couples trip! 

The work conference was 3 days in Barcelona, but we decided to add in a weekend in Lisbon for fun.  
Barcelona and Lisbon were both new cities for Glen, but imagine our surprise when the most reasonably priced plane tickets we could find included a 9-hour layover in Amsterdam (another city/country) that Glen had never been to!    Thus,  this very last-minute trip (mostly paid for by Glen's company) would get Glen TWO NEW COUNTRIES (#24 The Netherlands and #25 Portugal). 

This post is all about our 9-hour layover in Amsterdam!     

AMSTERDAM--MAY 13, 2022:  

We took off from SLC around 3:40pm on May 12th and arrived to Amsterdam around 9:30am the next day, so our bodies basically thought it was the middle of the night when we landed...a fact which will be clear when you look at our faces in the following pictures.  😐 

I had visited Amsterdam with Ellie and Adam a few years prior and thought it would be easy to just take a quick jaunt into the city, take a canal ride, walk around for a bit, and feel like we'd "seen" Amsterdam.  Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy though. 

Our plane was late arriving and finding the correct luggage lockers within the airport to leave our luggage in was more of a pain than we expected.    Then the Ubers  seemed to be hard to come by that particular day, so ended up taking taxis, which also made it much more expensive day than we anticipated.   Sadly, we ended up missing  our scheduled canal tour and  wished we hadn't scheduled anything unchangeable beforehand. 

With our canal tour down the tubes, we were back to square one with our plans. At the recommendation of the taxi driver, we ended up at Zaanse Schans.  

It's a lovely place a little outside the city, full of old iconic and picturesque windmills. 

We very much enjoyed wandering around enjoying a beautiful spring day... 

After trying and failing once again to get an Uber to take us into the city, we decided to go for a taxi instead.  Sadly, all the taxis were already reserved and we ended up having to call someone to send a taxi our way.   {yet another slow-down...}

After another very overpriced journey by taxi, we ended up in downtown Amsterdam.   Glen grabbed a traditional Dutch lunch at a very non-gluten-friendly restaurant, while I ended up grabbing some food from a nearby market.   Then we found a walk-on canal tour and toured the city....

It was less expensive than the pre-scheduled tour and honestly a great way to see more of the city than we ever could have if we were walking around. 

Amsterdam is a lovely city {mostly}and it was fun to introduce Glen to it, despite our limited time. 

Thankfully, one of the airport workers warned us before we left the airport, that security lines could be 2+ hours long to re-enter the airport, so after our canal tour, we hopped back into a taxi and headed back to the airport.   The lines were OBNOXIOUSLY long, so we were glad we'd given ourselves plenty of time to get where we needed to go.   We were completely exhausted at this point and I'd eaten hardly anything, thanks to the prevalence of gluten in all the airplane food and even the salads we found in Amsterdam.    

WE picked up our luggage from the lockers and off we went to Lisbon...