We have had such limited (and expensive) Internet access that I haven’t had a chance to blog about our fabulous European vacation… however, we’re now back in Amsterdam, on steady land again, and getting ready for a relatively early (though not as early as we might have hoped) bedtime so we can get up — I am not kidding — at 4 a.m. Amsterdam time (for those keeping track, that’s 9 p.m. CST) to make our way to the airport (a 15-minute indoor walk) for our 7 a.m. flight to — ugh — London’s Gatwick airport.
Yes, I said London.
We were elated beyond words to hear today we can take our two most expensive possessions (in our current possession, anyway) on the plane with us as of tomorrow, namely my laptop and Daniel’s digital camera. Up until about 2 p.m. today, we though we had to pack both of those in our checked luggage, and neither of us was happy with it. We were so worried about the MANY photos taken on this trip being lost forever because some baggage handler (or security guard), doing their job, would accidentally cause fatal damage to the laptop. So worried, in fact, that we bought a 50-pack spindle of CD-Rs today and backed up nearly 20 gigs of photos, or roughly 1,950 files of roughly 8 MB size, photos shot in RAW format. Why not DVDs, you ask? Because we don’t have a burner. (Rats!) Twenty-two burned CDs later, and we’ve got a full backup.
And now, we can take the laptop on the plane.
Well, at least we DO have the backup available. 🙂
At any rate, I need to get to bed, because I’m looking at < 6 hrs. of sleep.
But suffice it to say, friends, that this has been the vacation of a lifetime and I’m so glad we had these 2 weeks, 3 days in Europe. I’ll tell you all about our adventures when we get back. Just know it’s been fun, but as I knew would be the case, after 2 days of relaxation at the end of our cruise (Saturday & Sunday) and today putzing around the airport, we’re definitely ready to go home.
So think of us at 9 p.m. tonight, we’ll be getting up and groaning at the early local hour and walking over to the airport to begin what I’m sure will be an unusual trip home.
Flight time: 11 hrs 15 mins
Airport wait time: 5 hrs 30 mins