Day 161 – December 31

The end!

It is all over now, we have to go back to Holland, our American adventure
has come to a close. We had the alarm clocks set at 4.30AM. Everybody take a shower, get dressed and clean up the last items. We made the beds and everything that is unable to travel is put in our private closet.

Taking the last pictures prior our departure, doesn’t that look good?

American

At 8.30AM the first flight, for my mom and Brams parents, departed from Orlando Airport. Unfortunately the flight was totally full so we had to wait for the next flight departing at 11.30AM. Good for us this flight has some open seats left and we were even able to sit with the three of us. At 2.00PM we arrived at Detroit airport where we saw the granny’s and pops.

This is grandma’s and dads flight to Detroit, we have to wait three more hours before we see each other again.

We had an hour to relax prior the departure of our flight into Amsterdam.

At 4.00PM the first flight out of Detroit departs to Amsterdam, the flight looked good and without waiting till departure time we were accepted pretty early. So the six of us were able to all fly home on the same flight.

At 3.45PM we had all embarked the aircraft when we were told that because of a deficiency we had to wait. The slide was deployed and it would take some time to solve this, maybe up to 24 hours, we were told. Here you are waiting to depart …. but no it is not happening. We were given some drinks and snacks and after an hour we were told that all looked good and we might be able to depart within 90 minutes, excellent! Ahum, not so quick, not even five minutes later we were told to disembark and depart with another aircraft. This aircraft will not fly today, so everything had to offloaded, cargo, mail, bags and catering.

At 6.00PM it was 00.00AM and thus 2015 in Holland and since we still were in Detroit we wished each other a happy New Year. With the six of us we had our own New Years celebration, looked like we were the only Dutch on this flight.

I guess you get it, after more than three hours it was time to depart, everybody embarked the new aircraft and off we went, well wrong again! Now we had to wait because there were too many bags loaded, there was one passenger that was not on board but his bags were so those had to be offloaded first. After some 30 more minutes it was finally time to depart. We were glad we did because all the waiting starts to get to you after all these hours.

After an easy and smooth flight we arrived at 8.00AM local time at Schiphol Airport. Because of the fact that it was January 1, 2015 it took us three hours by train to get home.

Day 2 – July 25

Having our breakfast first, to start a wonderful day!

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Breakfast-3

On our way towards Cooperstown we drove through the City of Amsterdam. Well, city…. a small town!
When we saw Amsterdam we thought of all the Dutch we might see but unfortunately none of of that.
At the city hall we atleast were able to take some picture showing that we indeed were in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam-1

Amsterdam-2

Amsterdam-3

Amsterdam-4

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Amsterdam-7

While driving further we had to stop to do some groceries, so we stopped at Walmart. A megastore with two floors. In the middle there was an escalator and you were even able to take your cart with you! We have seen a lot of funny things while visiting The USA for the last 25 years but we had never seen something like this.

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