May 22-23, 2025: Highland to Salt Lake City to Amsterdam to Brussels

(Written August 3)

Our neighbor, Colette, came about noon on May 22 to take us to the airport. We were not quite ready, but we were really close. We were good on our end, but apparently we made Colette a little late for an appointment, so we had a very crazy ride to the airport! 

(Written on May 23)

We met Leta at the Salt Lake Airport, and we all flew to Amsterdam—overnight! We were super excited to finally be going. 

Gabe looked at Brian and said, “Dad, is this actually happening?!” and then showing his mind blown by the fact that we were finally doing it. 

The dinner served on the flight was good, and everything went according to plan until nobody slept well. Like everyone slept even worse than anticipated. Maybe in 1/2 hour increments at best. Probably the max sleep received was 3 hours. Maybe. 

We arrived exhausted [at 10 a.m. Amsterdam time on May 23], but once we made it through customs, got our bags, and made it on the train to Amsterdam Central Station, the excitement breathed new life into us. 

We figured out how to leave the giant station and find a place to lock up our luggage for the day. 

(Devri, Michael, Rachel, and Gabe accidentally rode first class when we paid for a 2nd class ticket on our train from the airport to the city. Oops.)

We wandered around, first going to find the giant clogs and Dam Square, 

then heading to Oude Kerk, the oldest building in Amsterdam, 

and then we accidentally wandered into the Red Light district, and ended up eating lunch there because people were losing their minds! We found a delicious place that made fresh stroop waffles, got a Nutella crepe, bubble waffles, and mini Dutch Pancakes. To counter the sweet, we also got some loaded fries (with Doner chicken) and a Doner Wrap. We all shared everything so we could try everything, and the sweet stuff was divine! The fresh strawberries really made them extra amazing. 

Leta and Devri across the street getting doner fries while Brian and the kids got the sweet stuff.

It was really good. Rachel's face proves it.

After lunch, we wandered toward the Anne Frank House. 

The alley ways were small and beautiful, so we tried to capture some of them.

Lick it!

We loved Michael and Rachel just hanging out all the time and chatting.

We were early, and it was cold. We sat on a bench outside trying to figure out what we wanted to do as we were 2 hours early and super tired. We were next to one of the canals, and the wind was really brisk. Nearby was a Tulip Museum. It was inexpensive to go inside, was a short walk, and would get us out of the weather. Initially, Michael said, “No, I don’t want to do that” until I emphasized “it will be warmer in there.” He ended up taking full advantage of the many benches and chairs to take little cat naps that refreshed his spirits (and ours). Brian had to practically shake him awake when we were leaving since he wasn’t responding at all and was truly out cold. 

[The Tulip Museum] was one of my favorite [parts] of the day, and we learned a lot of interesting things about tulips, like how at one point in Holland, a tulip bulb was worth more than a townhouse. Then the market crashed, and a lot of artists poked fun at all the people who had been so obsessed with tulips during the Tulipmania, as they called it. Eventually, the market corrected. Holland is the biggest tulip bulb producer in the world. Oh, and tulips aren’t actually native to Holland-they were discovered in the Himalayas. We learned some tips for growing our own tulips, and we managed to leave Amsterdam without any tulip bulbs (or other souvenirs besides our memories). 

Did we mention we were tired?

Exhibit A: Michael out cold.

After taking our time in the Tulip Museum, we headed back to the Anne Frank House. It was so incredible being in the building. We’d watched “A Small Light” leading up to our visit, Rachel and Gabe checked out library books about Anne Frank, and Rachel did her big biographical report for school on Anne Frank. We got to stand in the offices of those who helped hide them, see the bookcase that hid the secret annex, go through the secret annex, and then get to look at Anne Frank’s actual diary and some of her notebooks. It was amazing, heart wrenching, and hopeful all at the same time. They gave us audio guides for the tour, and you could pick to have the story told (as if) by Anne, or through the broader world lens. Rachel, Gabe, and Mom picked the Anne Lens, and the rest of us picked the world lens. I wish I could have heard both. Rachel and I were the last of our group to finish, and we took our time with it. I had tears fill my eyes multiple times. 6 million sweet, precious souls were mindlessly lost because of Hitler’s hatred of Jews. It is horrible. What a difficult 2 years those eight people had hiding out, and what a terrible and tragic ending! 

After the Anne Frank house, we wandered back to the Central Station, stopping to get burgers on the way (Side note—it is crazy how many fry places there are in Amsterdam. And pizza, and Doner type foods, but especially fries. I learned that fries might have actually been invented in Belgium, so I suppose it makes sense.) 

You may wonder why Brian is making this face. But if you look carefully at the building behind them, you might see it's a little tipsy. This was one of the worst ones we saw.

Brian single handedly saving us all from certain doom.

When we were a block away from the locker pickup, a bird pooped and hit mom and I (YUCK!), but I decided to take it as a sign that we will now have good luck on this trip. (Brian's note: we did. Thank you bird. Thank you Devri and Leta for your sacrifice.)

We got our luggage, found where to catch the Eurostar, 

and now we’re headed to Brussels for the night. I think Gabe finally fell asleep. We’re all looking forward to a flat bed tonight! Gabe at least conked out pretty quickly. That kid was so incredibly exhausted.

[August 3 again] We got off the train at the Midi Station in Brussels and walked to our hotel. After checking in, we crammed into the elevator, and then quickly got ready for bed. 

We all had our own bed. Kids got the top bunks. 

It was a little funky, but we were all just so happy to be going to bed after our exhausting day! 

We asked these questions on the train from Amsterdam to Belgium: 

Best food

Brian: airline breakfast (says apologetically) and the Dutch mini pancakes/strawberries

Leta: loaded fries at lunch and hazelnut crepe

Devri: Dutch mini pancakes

Rachel: Stroop waffles and bubble waffle

Michael: Airplane food

Gabe: hazelnut crepe

Favorite/best

Brian: Anne Frank House

Devri: Anne Frank House and seeing all the amazing architecture

Leta: Anne Frank and the architecture—it was just beautiful. I liked Amsterdam.

Michael: Anne Frank House (honorable mention to the Tulip Museum for having benches he could nap on)

Rachel: Anne Frank House and finally getting off that plane!

Gabe: Nutella Crepe, Anne Frank House was second

Worst

Brian: Right before the Tulip Museum when it was really cold and everyone was so tired

Devri: Right before we went through customs when my tiredness took over and all the weed and cigarette smoke everywhere. 

Leta: Lack of sleep, not being able to pronounce falafel.

Michael: When we were just sitting on the bench in the cold

Rachel: That I was still on that plane in the morning

Gabe: “You guys making me walk everywhere and wouldn’t let me do any screens all day” (He said at the end of the day after getting bad sleep on the overnight flight)

Post trip observations about Amsterdam: 

The cigarette and weed (marijuana) smoke was everywhere, despite signs saying it was forbidden to smoke weed. We learned pretty quickly to watch out for all the bicyclists--we almost got hit by them multiple times! It's incredibly easy to walk into the Red Light District--we did it twice during our short day there! The canals are beautiful, but they make the city colder. I would love to visit again when I'm well rested and see some of the other museums. The kids, on the other hand, weren't really impressed, but we think that's because we walked and walked after getting no sleep. We did plan this on purpose; we needed to adjust to the new time zone as quickly as possible so we could enjoy all the things we were seeing in the coming weeks, but this made our day in Amsterdam really tough. The kids also hated the smell (who doesn't!), and if we go back, we want to visit the mills outside of Amsterdam, do a canal cruise, and find some more interactive activities. 

Our Epic European Preparations

I think I mentioned this previously, but I began planning our trip to Europe back in 2023. I started with researching cruises. We all like cruising, and I thought it would be an easy way to see quite a few places. We knew that we wanted to do a Mediterranean Cruise, specifically Greece and especially Athens so we could see the Parthenon. As part of our trip, we wanted to go to Rome. I invited my mom along since she had never had the chance to go to Europe, so I would research and research cruises and then ask Brian and Mom what they thought once I found one that I thought could work. I looked into Princess, Disney, Carnival, Norwegian, Costa, and MSC. I eventually found an MSC cruise that checked the boxes for ports, timing, and was a lot less expensive than the others. Watching videos and reading articles led us all to believe that as far as onboard activities and food, we wouldn't be super impressed, so we decided to look at it as a floating hotel instead of a cruise like we were used to. 

After booking our cruise, we were sharing our excitement about our upcoming plans with Kirt and Julie, and we mentioned that we'd be sailing out of Bari, Italy. Kirt said, "I served [as a missionary] in Bari." I knew he'd been in Rome, but until we booked this cruise, I hadn't even heard of Bari. That was exciting to hear, so I said, "You should come with us!" So, even though Julie had sworn to never go on a cruise again, she got excited about our ports, and they booked a room on our cruise too!

This amazing trip was going to be even more amazing now. I marveled about how fortunate it was going to be to go on such an adventure with all of our parents. Our kids would get to see these amazing things with all their surviving grandparents. What an incredible opportunity! We also wanted to make sure that we saw Rome with Papa as our guide. 

The next thing we booked was a British Isles cruise with Carnival. I didn't look at too many other lines for this one. We've sailed a lot with Carnival and we've liked them a lot. They had a British Isles cruise that was at the right time and hitting all the right places for a good price. 

After that, we booked flights to and from Europe, and then we began the impossible task of choosing where to go and how to get there. I won't get into all of that. I watched a ton of YouTube videos about getting around Europe, train systems, cities, tours, and so many other Europe related things. I read lots of articles, and towards the end of planning, when I hit the worst decision fatigue of my life and basically shut down, Brian jumped in and utilized ChatGPT to help us figure things out (and then we verified everything ChatGPT told us!) 

Of course, we were constantly asking our kids what they wanted to see. Rachel requested Disneyland Paris. Michael wanted to see battlefields from World War I and II. He wanted to see trenches, and he wanted to visit Normandy. Gabe didn't really know what he wanted to see, but he was the most on board for all of it. 

We wanted to take our kids to see a concentration camp, and we originally wanted to go to Dachau. However, I was finding it really hard to get from Italy to Munich and from Munich to Paris in a way that didn't take a full day of travel and fit with our schedule we were cooking up. We explored going to Poland, and weirdly, it was easier to fly in and out of Krakow than Munich. Both sites discouraged bringing children under 13 to visit, and when I was watching videos about touring those camps, Rachel's tender heart was struggling, and she asked, "Why are we going to these horrible places?!" So, Brian and I thought that maybe we should not got to a concentration camp. However, when we told Michael we were going to remove a concentration camp from our itinerary, he got upset and said, "But that's in my top 3!" We didn't know there was a top 3, but once we did, we knew we had to go. We showed Michael tour videos of both Dachau and Auschwitz and let him pick which one he wanted to go see; he chose Auschwitz. 

When we booked our flights, we knew we wanted to fly directly to Europe, if possible. In September, while my mom was at our house to watch our kids during Brian's birthday trip to Disneyland, we looked at flights with her. We learned that there were direct flights from Salt Lake to Paris and from Salt Lake to Amsterdam. We also knew that my mom really wanted to see Paris. We ended up booking flights to Amsterdam, and we were able to have her on our Amsterdam flight with us. We would make our way from there to Paris and then to Rome, where we would meet Kirt and Julie, and then we'd all head to Bari and our cruise. We had plans to explore Rome more after our cruise, and then make sure we got my mom safely to the airport in Rome for her return flight on June 8. 

In January, 2025, Lara and Greg decided to join us on our cruise as well, and so our adventure got even more awesome. We'd also meet them in Rome, go to Bari, do the cruise with them, and as luck would have it, my mom and Lara and Greg even had the same flight from Rome back to the States. Mom, Kirt and Julie, and Lara and Greg let me be their travel agent and just book all the things for them--trains, metros, tour guides, and places in Rome. Kirt was awesome with helping me keep my feet on the ground and not book too many things while we were in Rome. 

When talking about Matthew's graduation, I mentioned trying to finish up an itinerary book. I designed it in Canva, and then printed it out using photoshop and my home printer (because I wanted it to be a quarter of a computer page, front and back, so it was a bit tricky figuring out how to format it so it would print just right). I laminated the covers, and Taryn brought her binding machine to Chelsea's so that she could bind them up with a spiral coil for our trip. 

This turned out to be such a valuable tool for our family. Brian converted my Canva document for Kindle, and so Brian, Rachel, Michael, and I all had access to it digitally (also one of my goals), and Gabe had his paper version that he took with him everywhere. I included an overall itinerary, and then descriptions of each place we were going, a daily schedule, which included "what to wear". 

I wrote the city description for Amsterdam, our first stop, but then with my time and energy running out, I called upon ChatGPT to write descriptions for the rest with a kids and teen audience in mind. I also asked it to tell me the top things to see in the Louvre and the British Museum. That turned out to be a bit of a lifesaver! 

 

I thought Rachel might use a paper version of our itinerary, but she preferred the Kindle version on her app. I wondered if the second copy had been a waste since it mostly lived in my backpack. Then, Gabe's copy met with a water accident, and we were able to give him the back-up copy. 

I really wanted to make sure that our kids had a good experience too and didn't just feel like it was a giant school field trip that they couldn't escape from. Someone online suggested creating a travel book together, and while I liked that idea, it just didn't seem feasible, but it put into my head the need to have a record of what we did each day. We really wanted to travel without a computer, so I got a keyboard for my iPad, and we committed to writing about our adventures each day. While we didn't always write the day of, we were able to write within a day or two so that we wouldn't forget anything important. However, that also means that we wrote A LOT more than we'd be writing if we wrote these as I post them. Buckle up, faithful readers; nearly 40 posts about Europe are coming your way.