Trip Highlights

Here's a rundown of highlights fresh in my mind from the past 9 days...

Prague

• Spending a good 5 hours exploring the Prague Castle area, it was so amazing
• Something about the John Lennon wall made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
• There was an entire row of lighted yellow penguins on the Vltava River.
• The Prague Beer Museum Pub is not a museum at all but the one pub in town where you can select from a whole slew of delicious local brews and I highly recommend it (and the cherry lager).
• Hearing great jazz with dinner
• Watching various sporting events at two different but equally cool Irish pubs
• Crossing the Charles Bridge, in all its beauty, like 10 times in 4 days
• Finding an amazing chess set at an outside market with pieces in a similar style of matryoshka dolls
• Hearing really bad 80's music in a lot of different places
• Consuming hot chocolate in mass quantity, in both cities actually
• Squeamishly enjoying a pizza lunch on a boat after visiting the Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments
• Finding amusement in the fact that the Museum of Communism resides in building with both a McDonald's and a casino

Amsterdam

• I had Dutch pancakes, twice. First time were the small ones, called Poffertjes which I had with vanilla ice cream. Second time was a large Dutch pancake with banana and chocolate syrup. So delicious!
• Visiting the Museum of Bags and Purses
• Walking around the city for hours just taking in the architecture and culture
• Becoming a bottle of Heineken
• Having an impossible time choosing from over 200 American microbrews from a bar near our hotel
• Cramming into a packed pub to watch Liverpool break Manchester United's win streak with fans of both teams
• Boating around the canals
• Eating delicious pasteries
• Playing "count the Argentinian steakhouses" while strolling the Kalverstraat shopping street
• Awkwardly looking the other way while doing the obligatory wander through the red light district

There were also a few lessons learned while on this trip. First off I will say that for the most part sites like Orbitz and Travelocity don't seem to save you much money these days. The prices seem to mirror what is offered by the airline. In our case though we did save by bundling our five flights into one purchase (Dulles to Munich, Munich to Prague, Prague to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Dulles). We may have saved but what a pain in the rear our itinerary became since the airlines were not willing to give us seat assignments until we were there, ready to fly. We were lucky in that we did get seats together for every flight except for our initial flight from Dulles to Munich. Jake was 5 rows behind me during that one, however, we did get put in Economy Plus for free (bonus!) and we slept almost the whole time. I will likely not use a site like that to book flights again though. What a hassle. On a brighter note we learned that sometimes purchasing a city's "tourist card" can work to your advantage. We purchased the I Amsterdam card for 48 hours and it more than paid for all of our museum visits, plus we got a free canal boat ride and a discount at the Heineken Experience. It was a smart move on our part.

Overall it was a wonderful trip and I was again reminded of why it is that I have always wanted to get out and see the world.