This morning felt different. For the first time on the trip, there was an ending. We woke, packed, and looked around the room at The Grand one last time. Five days ago, Amsterdam was simply a dot on the map and a collection of memories from twenty-five years back. Now it feels like a place we've somehow always known.
Amsterdam surprised us. It's simultaneously a village and a world city โ a place where billion-dollar companies, university researchers, artists, and canal boats all coexist beside people eating fries under a tree at 10 PM while the sun still hangs in the sky. It has layers. And then layers beneath the layers. As we packed, I found myself full of questions. How does this place even exist? Where did all the timber come from to build it? Why isn't it underwater?
Amsterdam shouldn't exist โ at least not the way we think cities should. Much of it sits at or below sea level, some areas more than a meter beneath the North Sea. The city is built on millions of wooden piles driven deep into the wet ground; the Royal Palace on Dam Square alone rests on more than 13,000 timber piles. Most of that wood came from Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltics. The secret: wood buried underwater doesn't rot, as long as oxygen can't reach it โ so those piles survive for centuries. The paradox is that a city built on water lives in constant danger from it, which is exactly why the canals are as much infrastructure as beauty: transportation, flood control, drainage, climate management. The Dutch don't fight water. They negotiate with it. As for the heat we kept feeling โ that's the same urban heat-island effect seen worldwide, stone and brick and pavement trapping warmth, moderated a little by all that tree cover and water. Sunblock remains undefeated.
With bags packed we headed out one final time. No agenda, just wandering โ coffee at STACH, a little shopping, one last walk through the Red Light District (simultaneously historic, bizarre, and surprisingly clean). Every alley had one final surprise, every bridge one final photograph, every canal one final reflection. I think that's what I'll remember most. Not any single thing. Just the feeling of wandering. Checking out of The Grand felt a little bittersweet โ six hundred years of history, and for five days, home.
We rolled our bags back to Centraal like seasoned veterans, caught the train to the airport, and marveled at how much easier departures feel than arrivals. Then came Schiphol security, where Dutch efficiency was apparently taking the afternoon off. We stood in line contemplating life, geopolitics, and whether airports intentionally distort time. Eventually we emerged victorious.
No lounge access this time โ a tragedy โ but Schiphol redeemed itself with an excellent West Coast IPA from Oedipus Brewing called "Gaia": bright, crisp, exactly what was required after surviving airport security. This is the beer arc doing its thing. We started this trip braced to settle for a $5 Blue Moon in the Delta Lounge; five days in, the country keeps handing us the exact right beer at the exact right moment. The Dutch punch well above their weight in the beer department.
Then BA435: gate, boarding, taxiing, more taxiing, even more taxiing. "Our taxi time today is quite long," the pilot informed us, in the mild tone of a man who already knew we had no idea what we were in for. He was not exaggerating. Schiphol is enormous and flat and endless, and we trundled out along the taxiways for what felt like a small road trip in its own right โ past other aircraft, past service roads, past the outer edges of the airport where the pavement finally surrenders to the countryside.
And that's where it got wonderful. The taxiway ran out into open Dutch farmland โ impossibly green, impossibly flat, cut into neat geometric parcels by those little drainage ditches that are really just baby canals. And there, right up against the fence line, were the cows. Actual dairy cows, grazing a few meters from a taxiing 737, lifting their heads to watch us roll by with the exact expression you'd expect: a flat, unbothered bovine stare that said, plainly, what in the world are you all doing out here? Fair question, honestly. We were two Americans in a metal tube being towed past a pasture at walking speed on the far edge of Amsterdam. The cows had a point. They went back to their grass. We kept taxiing.
Those cows grazing beside the runway are standing on the bottom of a former sea. Schiphol sits about 3 meters below sea level โ its name comes from Schip Hol, roughly "ship grave," because the area was once the stormy Haarlemmermeer, a lake notorious for sinking ships. In the 1850s the Dutch simply drained the entire lake with a ring of steam-powered pumping stations, turning open water into farmland and, eventually, one of the busiest airports on Earth. So the long taxi past the cows isn't just scenic โ it's a slow roll across the floor of a drained inland sea, kept dry by pumps running quietly to this day. Very on-brand for a country that treats the water table as a negotiation.
Eventually the engines spun up and we climbed into the afternoon sky over the Netherlands โ green fields, tiny canals threading between them like silver stitching, cows shrinking to white specks, tidy farms and greenhouses catching the light. From up here the whole below-sea-level logic of the place is suddenly legible: the dead-straight ditches, the geometric fields, the whole landscape visibly engineered. At one point Aimee reminded me we were looking down at land that sits below the sea we could see glinting on the horizon. That somehow felt very Dutch. Forty-five minutes later: "Go ahead, London." For reasons I can't explain, I heard it as the opening line of Big Audio Dynamite's "Bad" โ the one that kicks off with exactly that phrase. Landing at Heathrow felt like entering another chapter. Amsterdam is canals. London is momentum. The city feels larger, heavier, full of stories stacked atop one another for two thousand years.
We collected our luggage and made our way to Chelsea, where Michele was waiting. Travel is wonderful; seeing friends is better. There's something deeply comforting about arriving in a foreign city and knowing someone is waiting for you. Michele welcomed us like family. Laundry immediately became a priority โ we had officially reached "stinky mink" status.
There are football matches, and then there are football matches. The entire country seemed invested. Michele took us to the pub next door for the first half โ pints poured, optimism high. England scored. The country collectively inhaled. Then Argentina did what Argentina tends to do, and Messi reminded everyone that he remains Messi. Final: England 1, Argentina 2. The dream ended. Still, there are worse places to watch a match than London on a warm July evening. The tournament rolls on without England now โ and we'll be watching it to the end, wherever we happen to be.
Back at Michele's, after a few bottles of wine and a late dinner she graciously prepared, something remarkable happened. Without discussion, everyone simply found a task. Michele made the bed. Aimee attacked the dishes. I handled laundry operations. It became what can only be described as the Neurodivergent Olympics. No medals were awarded. Everyone won. Honestly, it might be one of my favorite moments of the trip โ there's something profoundly human about helping a friend with ordinary things after traveling halfway around the world.
The Roundup ยท Day 05
๐บ Beer of the Day. Oedipus "Gaia" West Coast IPA at Schiphol, with honorable mention to whatever England supporters were drinking during the match.
๐ฌ Scientific Fact of the Day. Amsterdam stands on millions of submerged wooden piles. In a strange way, one of Europe's great cities continues to float on a forest.
๐ต Song of the Day. "Bad" โ Big Audio Dynamite, the one that opens with "Go ahead, London," in exactly that voice.
๐ Quote of the Day. "There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." โ Vincent van Gogh. Amsterdam would agree.
โค๏ธ Moment I'll Remember. Standing over the Dutch countryside as the plane climbed toward London and realizing we'd gone from "Let's visit Amsterdam" to "Could we spend ten weeks here during a sabbatical?" That seems like an important question.