ROTTERDAM

A CITY FOR THE FUTURE

We boarded the water taxi to Rotterdam as it pulled into port a short walk from our apartment on one of the three converging rivers in Dordrecht. We thought the ride would be a scenic river adventure and opted for the hour-long journey instead of the ten-minute train ride.

It became a ride through Holland's second most famous export: ships, second only to tulips. Interesting. We were hoping for windmills. What you see are huge gleaming boxlike buildings large enough to house an oil tanker. It's impressive in its size but not particularly photogenic.
Because of Holland's importance in manufacturing prior to World War II and Rotterdam's industrial prominence Rotterdam specifically became a major target for destruction by the Allies during World War II. Very little of the old city of Rotterdam survived the war but what has now risen in its place is a city architecturally representative of a new world.

This is where the boat part of our trip became visually exciting. As we pulled into Rotterdam the architecture of the new city became a gateway into the twenty-first century where the architects of a new era were laying down a new footprint in the harbor city of Rotterdam.

Holland is a country of waterways and canals. It actually exists at a point below sea level and that is where it has garnered its reputation as a country saved by dykes. You can take that anyway you choose.

We had a planned destination of Binnenrotte Square where we'd find the new market,

Market Hall, designed by the architectural firm MVRDV.

This is where we were to meet up with Rogier, the oldest of the Vermeer children.

The market sits in an open square amongst a collection of new buildings rivaling the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The buildings are as playful as a child's toy box with structures that evoke crayons,

a Lego construction and children's building blocks.

The market is an immense structure in the shape of a horseshoe. The outer shell houses apartments that look both in and out of the market.

Inside the curved ceiling is a huge mural made of four thousand generated tiles printed on steel panels depicting all the varieties of produce and plant life sold at the market.

The monumental scale of this mural makes you feel like an insect scurrying around the underbrush of some huge lush garden.

The market is filled with vendors displaying everything from fresh vegetables,

to sugary sweets,

to Holland's signature cheeses

to ethnic foods from around the world.

Restaurants dot the interior several of which have seating areas that appear to be suspended in mid-air above the market floor. We made our first task after finding Rogier to scout out the market for a place to eat. A walk along the aisles didn't help much in narrowing down the possibilities but soon hunger took over and we decided on Italian.

We were glad we did.

The pastas all came in bowls too big to finish in one sitting and decorated with balsamic, parsley and tomato jelly.

I think the adults could have spent hours after lunch exploring the different stalls and sampling the tastings every vendor seemed prepared to offer. After all, we had a pair of very savvy foodies along for the trip: Rick having apprenticed under Peter Kump and Laura having been a finalist on Holland's version of Top Chef.

Yet with all their knowledge neither one of them could come up with an answer of what exactly this fruit was.








MUSEUM BOIJMANS VAN BEUNIINGEN

Walking distance from Binnenrotte Square is Rotterdam's art museum, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, housed in a 1930's building that missed the destructive bombing of the Second World War.

It has an impressive collection of Dutch masters and international artists dating from medieval to the present. We browsed through some of the permanent collection on our way to a special exhibit called the

"Design Derby". Each of us was given a booklet and our task was to  wander the maze of displayed items where one side held Dutch design and the other Belgian. Each era you were taken through had a card with an image of the Dutch artifact on one side and the Belgian on the other. Our task was to insert the card in our booklet with the design we preferred face up.

At the end of the maze we were to tally up our score; so many for the Dutch and so many for the Belgians. There were two large screens at the end of the maze, each with a button below them. We were to go to the screen that held the name of the country that received the most face up cards in our booklet and hit that buzzer. The screen then tabulated our score adding another point to our designated design winner. Of course, the Dutch were far ahead.

The last thing on the back page of our booklet was a design competition we could enter where we were asked to design a wearable and environmentally significant shoe. I was the only one from our group who participated. We'll see if I win anything.

DORDRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS

THE REASONS FOR STAYING IN DORDRECHT

We've done enough traveling around Europe to know that our most memorable trips don't center around the big cities and popular tourist destinations. This isn't to say we don't include treks to those museums and restaurants that are always highlighted in the travel books and on the must see lists, we do. But we love staying in some of the smaller destinations. Those places less crowded with tourists, places where it is easier getting to know the locals and the way their cultures mirror and differ from ours.

That's part of the reason we're in Dordrecht, a small historic canal town just outside Rotterdam and about an hour and a half south of Amsterdam.

The other half of the reason and the main reason for making this trip in the first place is to spend time with our close friends the Vermeer/van Zon's: Wim, Laura and their kids Rogier, Victor and Andrea.

While Emmy will be staying with Laura and the kids in an apartment that borders on one of Dordrecht's boat lined canals, Rick and I have rented a garret on the opposite side of the canal in view of the van Zon apartment.

It's a third floor walk-up with pitched walls that follow the peaked rooflines.

The apartment came with very simple furnishings lining a combination living area and kitchen, an expansive bedroom, a small terrace overlooking the canal and a renovated bathroom.

Each room had its charm: the kitchen with its cabinetry made from found lumber and its concrete countertop,

the bedroom with its bed in all white linen

and a closet made from plywood shipping crates,

the terrace with its blue bench and spectacular view

 and the bathroom with its pebble floor, claw foot bathtub and rain head shower.

The owners had a small antique shop on the bottom floor. Little vignettes of children's toys from their shop where sparsely and strategically tucked into corners and along ledges leading into the loft. This was a space that perfectly suited our personalities. That added to our list of perfect choices when it came to finding the best lodgings for our holiday.

A LITTLE ABOUT DORDRECHT

The world is filled with cities and towns I've never heard of. I'd be no match for the kids who compete in the National Geographic Bee. If it weren't for our friends the Vermeer/van Zons I probably would never have thought of Dordrecht as a travel destination. I would have missed this jewel in the heart of the Netherlands.

Dordrecht is a town of 120,000 inhabitants, about the size of Green Bay or about a third the size of Madison. I'd always taken great pride in our hometown on the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, but I'm forced to concede its total lack of charm in comparison to a town like Dordrecht.

I know we haven't the longevity factor that much of Europe possesses; Dordrecht is Holland's oldest city dating back to 1220 when the count of Holland granted city rights to a residential area that would be called Dordrecht.

Architecturally we're hard pressed to compete with the historic heritage Europe is able to build on

and our commercial offerings are at a disadvantage as we're so spread out we can't expect a walking city center to be a part of our culture.

Our expectations on coming to Dordrecht were quite modest. We were thinking a sweet little town with a couple of interesting shops, a few restaurants and not much more. What we found was a center city so delightful and culturally overwhelming we gasped at every street corner as we looked down another brick lined alley or canal filled with high-end shops, antique stores, art galleries, museums, churches that we would have called cathedrals, market squares and architecture that covered every century from medieval time to the present.
There was so much to see and report on I find I'll have to do more than one posting on the town that has stolen our hearts.

AMSTERDAM, THE HOTEL VONDEL AND MONEY

THE HOTEL VONDEL, AUGUST 5-6, 2015

Our cab driver from the airport transported us to a little one-way street tucked into the museum district in Amsterdam. His Tesla zigged and zagged following the tracks the electric trolley cars follow. He told us how he needed a special tag allowing him the privilege of driving on those tracks and avoiding the lines of cars inching along on the brick streets running parallel to the trams.

I had forgotten how beautiful the pictures were telling the story of the hotel. The hotel is very deceptive from outside. You don't see the size of the hotel that remains classified as a boutique hotel but once inside and especially on the guided tour we were taken on to get us to our room you begin to see how several buildings have been sewn together to form the whole hotel. As we walked through archways carved between the buildings we traversed half steps and landings that were three steps up and then five steps down to get to our room.

Our room was on the second floor with windows facing the back of the hotel. I made everyone stop from carting our five pieces of luggage into the room so I could photograph the pristine beds without the impressions of three very tired butts imprinted into the eider down comforters.

The room was beautiful from the beds themselves to the bathroom

and even the detailed notes left making it a very non-smoking room.

The amenities of the hotel were equally impressive. The lobby was almost as inviting as the room with its tufted couch and collection of art and found objects.

The hotel has its own restaurant with a broad menu that we had to pass on but we were more than excited to take advantage of the following morning for breakfast.

There was also a garden with more room for dining and a pair of reflecting pools that hugged the stairs leading down into the shaded oasis. For a first stop even if it was only for one night a stay at the Hotel Vondel was a welcome beginning to our Dutch journey.

CHIP TIP

Planning for Europe became an unexpected challenge when trying to set up the financial part of the trip. We thought we had turned over every stone. We knew we would get the best rate of exchange by using our cards at ATMs and banks. We had talked to our personal banker and notified her of every country we'd be traveling to so they could track our trip and not be concerned seeing charges coming from Holland, The Czech Republic or Portugal. What we didn't check on and what we really couldn't know until we had already flown across the Atlantic was the European chip. If your American credit card doesn't have the chip, the European card readers won't recognize your card and it gets rejected. They can't manually enter your card numbers, they can't call the card company, nope, you're sunk. Purchasing those little clog souvenirs and paying for hotels and meals can become a real challenge.
The tip: If you're going overseas check to make sure you've got the chip and then all your pin numbers before you get there. And, oh, by the way, there are also stores that won't take cash, something to do with the falling value of those darn Euros.

AUGUST 4-5 CABS, PLANES AND RELIEF

FLYING ON A PLANE NAMED HELL

Loose ends. Who among us feels tidy in those few hours before the dash out the door that first day of a holiday? There were those last meetings to attend, then the checklist of all those items that needed to be dealt with for the trip, a list that should have been written on lined paper but instead became a spinning set of disjointed words swirling around in the miasma of my mind. Plucking them out as I could like Lucy and Ethel trying to grab all the chocolates running by on a conveyor belt I grabbed what I could and the rest just slipped by.
We had ordered a minivan from 777-7777 to get us, our two large suitcases, three carry-ons, Emmy's purse which had grown to the size of Santa's toy bag on his Christmas run, my U.S. postal satchel and a Victoria Secret shopping bag filled with sandwiches, chips and fruit. The truth is neither Rick nor I are particularly calm fliers especially when not every "i" had been dotted and every "t" crossed. For this trip we had one major "t" left without its crossbar, our boarding passes.

Try as we might to get ourselves checked-in online we were completely unable to make the TAP site follow our instructions and spit out our passes and seat assignments. Every attempt was met with a final window saying "failure" followed by another email from some TAP computer asking us why we hadn't checked in as of yet. After our fifth attempt we went to the phone lines where we waited approximately twenty-seven minutes and forty-one seconds for an agent with mediocre English. Our agent tried to get our boarding passes using the same process as we had with the same results, "failure". He finally told us we'd need to do what the screen on our computers had told us on our five previous attempts: we'd have to go to the terminal and speak to the desk agent at check-in. What he failed to tell us was the desk agents wouldn't be there for the day, they'd only show up two and a half hours before departure. We aren't calm travelers when things don't go as planned. Flight departure time: 5:55pm. Shaver/Melahn departure from our Manhattan apartment: 11:30am. Emmy stayed out of the fray vocally but her face kept forming the expression for, "Are you kidding me?"
Now for that cab ride, we nor our driver had done a traffic check before we all got on the road. Seeing the line up for the Lincoln Tunnel should have tipped us off. It was a massive back up. Apparently sometime in the early morning a dump truck had tipped over and caught fire on the New Jersey turnpike and traffic had been stopped in both directions. It was going to be a nail-biter of a ride to get us to Newark. What should have been a forty-five minute drive at most ended up taking two hours and it would have been double that if our driver hadn't decided to throw traffic etiquette out the window and drive the last six miles on the illegal shoulder while I grabbed the sissy bar and white knuckled it all the way to the terminal.

We arrived around 1:30 to an empty row of ticketing desks. As I said, the desks weren't to open until 2:30, but we hadn't been told that by anyone of our TAP phone line agents. Our reward: we were first in line. When the agents did finally appear and they did print our boarding passes they couldn't give us three seats together.

Two of us had seats we thought were a window and an aisle and the other was thirty rows back. Emmy had wanted a window seat so she could use her birthday gift, a Go-Pro video camera, to take pictures of the take-off. It was decided that she and Rick would take the two seats together and I would take the loner. Boarding was a cattle call with everyone trying to stampede the gate. Emmy made it in first since her ticket was the one with the 42E designation and they were trying to board from the back of the plane forward. The plan was to have her grab my 12E seat and I'd move back to her 42E when our ticket group was allowed on. The surprise was walking in and seeing her in the middle section of a two, five, two row configuration. Apparently E and F are dead center in that seat alignment. One of the stewardesses had already taken Emmy under her wing.

The stewardess intercepted me and guided me to my seat - her seat, the last middle seat at the very last row of the plane. I squeezed in between a six-four hulk who continued to fight me for our common armrest for the entire duration of the flight and a young ninety pound woman traveling with her cat.  Her routine for the journey included wiping her plate clean at each meal, gobbling snacks in between and then sneaking into the bathroom after each eating episode for twenty minutes at time presumably to purge her self of whatever she ate while the cat meowed and peed in its carrier.

A woman with a three month old sitting on one of the outer seats finally came to apologize to me while the young woman was on one of her bathroom trips. She had changed her baby's diaper three times thinking the stink was coming from her child. She eventually realized the smell wasn't coming from the kid but from the cat. Sometimes traveling means you just have to grin and bare it.

LISBON AND THE ANA LOUNGE

We bit on twenty-five euros apiece after the flight from hell to spend our time between flights in the luxury of the ANA lounge at the Lisbon airport. Splurges are by definition a spending of money freely and without remorse. Well I'll second that. We needed relief and we found it in Lisbon.

The ANA lounge offered showers, sleeping rooms, an open luxury seating area stocked with snacks and I don't mean potato chips and Twinkies. They had prosciutto, Camembert, speck and brie sandwiches, berry tarts with custard and pain au chocolat. They had juices and sodas, beer and hard liquor. Sometimes money does buy everything.

BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY

AUGUST 1, 2015

The clear blue skies that blanket Madison most summer days had embraced the first day of August. There is a clarity in taking a deep fearless breath on these crystal clear days. The three of us: Rick, Emmy and I left our luggage for the trip at home and headed off to the eighth oldest temple remaining in the United States, The Gates of Heaven, a small sandstone and cream brick building built in 1863 by German immigrants. The refurbished temple sits to the side of a city park on the shores of Lake Mendota.

Two teenagers handed out the parchment programs for the wedding of Rene Robinson and Michelle Reints. It would be our first gay wedding where a legal document verified the legitimacy of the marriage between two women. It was to be the beginning of a purging of decades of personal stress and eons of second-class citizenship for a marginalized segment of society. There wasn't any rice to be thrown but the mantle of repression and failure was tossed to the wind as we started our personal and travel adventures in the warmth of the August of 2015.

We drove back home and packed the car with our five pieces of luggage: two large and three carry-ons all of them the new four-wheel versions that seem to glide through airport gateways. It was now dusk as we turned onto the ramp leading to I-94 our link to Milwaukee and our first stop on the road back to a month in Europe. July thirty-first was a blue moon day, but August first saw the moon rise over the eastern horizon the size of a silver dollar and the color of a bar of gold. It rose right in front of us like the bright light people say they see with near death experiences.

They say it appears as the light leading to the gates of heaven. It was our beacon. It was what pierced our psyches and drew us onward with excitement towards a journey we had every expectation would be wonderful and if that wasn't enough just as the moon rose over the tree line a spectacular fireworks exhibition burst to our side cascading the embers of wonder as a talisman for the trip ahead.