Vacation Friday and Saturday (June 5-6): travel

 I was a bit of a nervous wreck leading up to vacation.  Thunderstorms were predicted to roll through the area right around the time that we were going to leave and I'm a bad pre-traveler.  Things were spotty all during the day and eventually we arrived at the airport.  (Besides worry about the weather, leaving in the evening is really nice!  It gave us the whole day to finish up packing and clean the house before leaving.)

Anyway, Ben had noticed that there was an earlier trip to Detroit and managed to get us on that one!  It was slightly delayed, but not by much, and we got out of Grand Rapids easily.  There was a bit of confusion as the gate agent changed our standby seats so that we were still all sitting together, which changed some other peoples' seats that had printed tickets, and it was a bit of a fiasco.  But we got out before the weather and landed in Detroit and my stress level immediately went back to normal.

We got to Detroit with plenty of time, so after a sit down dinner the kids and I rode the tram.  We rode a full loop of one tram.  Then realized that the other tram curved at the central station so we rode a full loop on that tram.  As Isaac then said, "I remember these being more fun."

The plane took a bit to clean, so we were once again delayed.  We were all so tired - it was after 10:30 and it had been a long day.  We eventually got on the plane.  Isaac and I rested right away, but I didn't sleep - my legs kept having issues.  They served a dinner (which Isaac ate some of - everyone else declined) and finally turned off the lights.  I managed to sleep for a bit under four hours, although it was rather interrupted sleep as Isaac and I kept moving around.  Poor Ben didn't sleep at all.

We still got to Amsterdam around the expected time, so we had plenty of time to make it through passport control.  This ended up being a rather good thing, because they are rolling out the new EES system and well, I'm not sure it was working at all.  I did not get fingerprinted.  Also, the line started out moving pretty well, and when we were two back-and-forths away it ground to a halt.  And then moved very, very slowly.  By this time we could see what was going on and there was a combination: several agents left on break, the officers were trying to get the shorter layover people through first, and some general confusion.  At one point the main line had no customs agents looking at our passports - all the agents were either doing the short layover or diplomatic passengers.  This is fine until it isn't - there were several families around us that had been ok on time until that point, but then they were so far ahead in the line that they got ignored...but our line wasn't moving.  I felt rather stressed for them, but we had time.  All in all, it took us 1.5hours to make it through.

Then we found some food!  Isaac and Joshua got what they thought were yogurt parfaits, but it was more of a cheesecake.  Joshua especially found this hilarious that his lunch was cheesecake.  Isaac was in rough shape before eating...I got back to our table after filling the water bottles to find Isaac just sitting there.  He had been on a mission to find spoons.

Amanda: did you find spoons?
Isaac: no. I'm hoping dad will come with some
Amanda: did you talk to Dad?
Isaac: I couldn't find him.

So, in summary, I went to find the spoons because Isaac's brain wasn't working.

We found our gate for our last flight and, surprise surprise, it was delayed too.  Again, not by much, but Ben's curse was active.  Since we had about two hours, Joshua and I went out to explore.  This is one of my favorite things to do with Joshua - he's always up for walking around new places to see what there is to see.  We went to concourse D, which was actually rather interesting.  You had to go up stairs to get to the concourse and there was also sky lounge 25.  If you went up more stairs you found sky lounges 26 and 27, one of which let you go on the roof.  The roof wasn't overly nice - just concrete squares - but there were some picnic tables and an airplane on display.  We also found some nice lounge chairs that we could have used, but they were rather busy.  We went up some other escalators and found a whole additional food court!  On our way back we went down some escalators to use some bathrooms.  They were the standard bathrooms in the airport, but the odd thing was that the door handles looked like that should turn but were really just push/pull type.  I and another woman both bonded over having issues, only to find out that Ben had similar issues at a different bathroom unit.

We finally got to board and we loaded through the back of the plane.  I feel like I've done this once or twice, but it ended up being a very common thing in Europe.

Denmark is flatter and more full of farms than I imagine in my mind.

We got to our hotel around 6:30pm (ish) local time.  Our first hotel had a ramp for luggage, but it was a rather steep ramp and didn't work all that well.

Then we went over to Lalandia, a waterpark thing like Great Wolf Lodge, to just check it out and get dinner.  On the way, we found a playline on the sidewalk!  There were dots all along the edge and sometimes they were close together and sometimes they were farther apart.  Both kids enjoyed jumping/walking on them.

We walked around a bit, looked in the little grocery store, and ordered some pizza.  I also picked up some strawberries from the store and they were delicious.  On our way back we stopped at the outdoor exercise spot near our hotel.  The weather was nice and the kids had a ton of energy to burn.

And that was the end of the day!  Everyone was ready for bed.  Ben fell asleep first around 9pm with Isaac and Joshua close behind.  I took a shower and then fell asleep easily.