Jennifer, Griffin and I spent a week in the Netherlands, mostly Amsterdam, enjoying ourselves and doing all the touristy things. We’re here because next week I’m participating in a technical tour in Utrecht with a bunch of my Georgia ITE colleagues. You’ll see a bunch of posts about infrastructure and roads, but for now here’s some photos and commentary from our trip.
You will notice that baby foxy is enjoying her time.
Unsurprising, I’m sure, but there are an awful lot of bicycles in Amsterdam. Moving around the city center is fast, convenient, and relatively safe because everyone yields to everyone else. I think I heard a car honk twice over the course of the week. 
Whenever we travel, we always dine at good restaurants. We don’t regard it as splurging so much as participating in the food economy. We dined one night at Rijks, a one star Michelin restaurant. We all had the tasting course and Jennifer and I had the wine pairing after which Griffin was irritated because we had had too much to drink.
If you go to Amsterdam, you have to visit the Rijksmuseum. It is the national art museum and well worth the trip. It’s like visiting the Met in New York; you can’t do it all, so pick a couple things to go see and don’t worry if you don’t see all the others.
We visited Amsterdam in the middle of tulip season so we had to visit Keukenhof, an easy 40 minute bus ride from Amsterdam. And it’s only 40 minutes because of the traffic jams due to all the people going to Keukenhof. It was packed with people, but it honestly wasn’t that big a deal. We got plenty of time to look at the flowers.
Rather than heading straight back to Amsterdam after our tulip visit at Keukenhof, we spent the night in Noordvijk to be at the beach, see the sunset, and go to the ESA Space Expo. We could’ve continue to participate in the wonderful transit system in the Netherlands and taken a bus but honestly, we decided to get a rideshare to save us some time.
We spent three more days in Amsterdam and did a lot more tourist things such as walking a lot, went shopping, had a high tea at the Duchess, went to the Van Loon museum, visited the KattenKabinet, and generally had a good time as a family.
Today I am in the Hague for solo touristing after sending Griffin and Jenn home. Tomorrow I will be in Utrecht where we will start our technical tour and I’ll have some commentary about what we see and what we learn. Throughout it all Baby Foxy will be learning with me. She’s been to more countries than I have!
