Saturday, May 13th, 2023 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Updated: Sep 24, 2023
This morning we left Bath and drove about 1 ½ hours along the M4 to London’s Heathrow Airport where we saw Laura and Noah safely into their hotel where they will stay one night before returning to the US tomorrow; they are staying at the Sofitel Hotel right at terminal 5 and so convenient for their British Airways flight. Sandra and I made our way over to Terminal 3 for our 2:45PM KLM flight to Amsterdam.
Sandra has visited Amsterdam several times before, this is my second visit – we are meeting up with our daughter and son-in-law who are joining us from Scotland for three nights. Arriving at Schiphol airport around 5PM we took a taxi for the 20-minute ride to the INK hotel in central Amsterdam. Once upon a time, back in the early 1900’s, the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal was the news street of Amsterdam. Newspaper offices and printing houses dotted the map around here. It was a vibrant and bustling area where stories were being chased, written and printed. In fact, INK Hotel building used to be the home of the roman-catholic newspaper De Tijd (The Times) right up until 1974. Both the offices and the printing house were located right here in this spot. As is typical of many buildings in Amsterdam, the INK was really skinny and quite deep; the street was a mess; it looked like it had been dug up for construction for some time and there was lots of garbage was piled up at several points. Inside the hotel was quite slick but quirky; a trestle table for a reception desk, glass roofed lobby area, lots of references back to the printing days – typewriters, large letters stuck on the walls. We were not happy with our assigned room; while it was very clean and quirky with a neat “hand drawn” map on one wall, it was very small and did not appear to be in the category that we had reserved – after complaining, we were promised a larger room for the next two nights.
Later we met up with our family and headed out for dinner. It was quite late, and we were tired and did not want to spend a lot of time hunting around for a restaurant. We agreed on burgers and found a dubiously named place called the Nude Burger Club, thankfully the “Nude” referred to the simplicity of the burger and not the dress code of the patrons. The burgers were good and satisfied our needs.
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