Where You Land Is Key To A Good Trip

One of our best decisions in planning this amazing trip for the Taylor Schlitz family was picking an initial city where we could take a couple of days to get used to the time change.  Amsterdam was a great choice for so many reasons.

First, when facing such jet lag, it was great to be in a place where we could easily communicate with people.  The people were so nice from the moment we arrived.  They never seemed irritated that we knew very little to no Dutch.  They constantly expressed to us how grateful they were for our willingness to come visit their wonderful city.

Second the food was great.  Our apartment was located in a very diverse area of Amsterdam and there were many "ethnic" food choices.  We ended up eating at a great little restaurant, PERA, that featured Mediterranean foods that the whole family would eat.  Chicken is chicken they say and PERA helped our children maintain a food regiment that they were used to eating at home.

Third point was that they had great local grocery stores.  The beauty of the apartment is it allowed us to go to the local grocery store and help keep our food costs down.  The store close to the apartment was fully stocked with all the necessities and the price was very reasonable (although the Dollar to Euro made us lose out on the cost end anyway).  A side note they do not refrigerate the eggs at the grocery store.  They are on a normal aisle shelf right next to the other items like honey and cookies.  A side note for our local grocery store was that they were running some type of promotional campaign aimed at children that gave each our children a little animal figure during each visit.  As you can image the kids quickly fell for these cute little animals and were constantly asking us to take them to the grocery store.

Fourth point is mass transit.  Amsterdam has a great light rail system that can get you to anywhere you need to go.  There are no ticket machines.  Instead they have staffed ticket counters on the train.  They must have a strong public employees union to be able to pull that off.  :-)   The cost was a little expensive and you could buy hourly or daily tickets.

Final point for those traveling with children is pick a city with great parks.  I can't stress how happy our kids were to see the playground when we went to the park.  In particular there was one park with a zip-line ride that they kids just loved.  I believe we could have spent everyday in Amsterdam at this one particular playground if the kids had their way.