November 1, 2024 Portland OR

Our fall trip is over. The flight home was uneventful and even a little luxurious. KLM recently took over the Amsterdam to Portland route from Delta. When we booked the flight on Deltas website I noticed that Business Class was about the same price as we usually pay for economy plus so we enjoyed the luxury of business class. KLM must have been trying to fill the plane for one of their inaugural flights, it was nice to see how the other half lives.

We added one new country to our list in Switzerland, and continued our fondness for Italy by spending some unplanned (originally) time in Italy. Since the purpose of this trip was fall colors we found the best colors were in Bled Slovenia.

We are looking at our options for the next trip. This could include a trip east towards Hungary while taking in Berlin and Vienna which we keep missing on our trips. We are also looking at going south towards Morocco.

We are still enjoying traveling this way, and I see a few more trips in our future before we wrap up our European adventure.

October 31, 2024 Amsterdam NE

Today we dropped François off at the Tulip Farm for storage this winter. We took our time leaving the campground in Amsterdam as the airport hotel will not let you check in early so we were trying to time our arrival for 3pm.

François getting his pre-storage bath at the truck wash near the airport.

We did some last minute clean up in the morning, and packed all of the dry food and paper away in plastic boxes to try to keep the mice away this winter. Finally around 11:30 we headed over to a truck wash near the airport to give François a good wash before heading to storage.

One of about 10 storage buildings that used to be used for Tulip farming.

After the wash we headed over to the Tulip farm, we had to detour around what looked like a pretty nasty motorcycle crash on a narrow road near the storage, but arrived about 1:30 at the storage. The storage we use used to be a Tulip farm and the old buildings that used to be for growing Tulips have been converted to storage. We have outside storage as the inside storage is completely full. The last step before we left was to set a couple of mouse traps just in case.

Our final stop for the day was the airport Ibis Hotel, where they were kind enough to let us into the room at 2pm instead of making us wait until 3pm like last time. Ton spent part of the afternoon doing a final rearrangement of the bags while I enjoyed Dutch TV.