The Tucker Stories

Ken and Kayoor’s Excellent Adventure!!! A couple of weeks ago, Kayoor had told me of his business trip to The Hague at the end of April and would I like to meet up with him. Of course, I took him up on the offer as he would be an excellent tour guide of the city; the lessons learned from this would be passed on once the family gets here. So, we’d coordinated to meet at his hotel in The Hague and we’d then travel on to Amsterdam. As it was only a day trip for me, we had about 5 hours in the city together but it’d be well worth it. I’d gone to the train station in Heerlen to purchase the tickets, however, I’d be traveling from the stop just down the street from our house. Though I knew where the train station was, I did not know how long it would take to walk down to it. Since the train was scheduled to leave at 10:05 a.m., I left the house about ten minutes after nine. It only took ten minutes to get there, so I was able to spend some time looking over the station and deciphering the ticket machine. Once the train got in, the conductor was quite helpful in answering my questions about the procedures for riding, which were pretty straightforward. The train schedules are quite precise as your train would arrive at the station and the connecting train would depart about three minutes later. This isn’t too bad as connection would be either at the same platform or across the platform. Not like Atlanta airport, crossing terminals and gates!!! The only excitement was the connection from Sittard to Eindhoven. I’d arrived on platform 2A and was to meet the next train on 2B about three minutes after I got in. Pretty easy, right? Well, a train shows up on schedule and I follow the herd on. But, as I’m sitting down, I notice that this train is going to Haarlem, not Eindhoven!!! After about two minutes of rooting through my schedule and trying to figure out just what the deal is, the train leaves the station. Whelp, there it is; nothing I can do now, I’m along for the ride, though I did consider hitting the emergency brake!!! So now I waited until the first stop and realize that I’ll be getting off of the train at Eindhoven, the train itself continues on to Haarlem!!! Whew!!! Now I’m on my way!!! Meeting Kayoor was very easy as his hotel in The Hague is adjacent to the central train station, Den Haag Centraal, and the trip to Amsterdam was easy, too, especially since Kayoor’s made this trip several times. Once in Amsterdam, we went to the Rembrandt museum, cruised around the downtown, and watched the Queen’s Day celebrations. Really was an enjoyable trip. The best part of the trip was Kayoor taking me to his second favorite Indian restaurant in Amsterdam (The first requires reservations!) and introducing me to authentic Indian cuisine. Truly remarkable. This was the first time that I can think of where the wine was fine by itself, it actually got better with the food. Kayoor ordered the meal of Chicken Aloo, Lamb Saag, Pickled Pickles and mixed vegetables. He was hesitant to order the lamb as I’d not had that before but I was adamant to try new things. The whole point of going out was to see the new/different things. I would’ve stabbed and guessed at the menu if Kayoor had not been there!! We had no troubles getting back to the Amsterdam Centraal and me making the connection back home from Den Haag. The trip home was pretty nice, too. As the Dutch are a very courteous and polite group of folks, they didn’t jerk the train into or out of the stations, nor were they too loud or obnoxious with their arrival messages, to a fault. I know this because I woke up at my last transfer, Heerlen, just in time to see my next train pull away from the station!!!! So, instead of a ten minute train ride to my last station and then a ten minute walk to the house, I was left with an hour and fifteen minute walk of 7.5 Kms to the house!!!! Trust me, I was awake when I got home, that’s for sure!!! I was awake enough to describe my day to and share the pictures with Kelly and the kids. So, all in all, it was a tremendous adventure and truly look forward to the next one!!! BTW, I’d found my Amsterdam travel map at a bookstore in Raleigh and was very happy with it. Kayoor was very impressed with it, too. Must be pretty good to impress a globe trotter!!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 10:16 pm and is filed under European Life, Snaps, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.