Our Netherlands Misadventure

After we flew out of Romania we were delayed in Amsterdam for 2 whole days. Apparently the pilot had been sick for the last flight and for ours, so the airline wouldn't even fly us somewhere else because there were too many people delayed. So we were stuck, and the among other things, we didn't have any money. We had spent our last money in Romania thinking that we were as good as home, not even thinking of the possibility of getting stranded somewhere. We tried using our credit card but apparently you need a PIN number in Europe to use credit cards, and we didn't have one. We tried to get a cash advance from a bank but it wasn't working even though we called the credit card company twice and they said it should work.

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Also, the airline wouldn't give us our checked luggage, and we had mostly dirty clothes in our carry-ons. We were really unprepared to be delayed like this. Usually delays are a few hours, or maybe even overnight, but we'd never even heard of a two full day delay.

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Thankfully the airline put us up in a nice hotel with all meals included. The bummer was that the airport and hotel were too far outside of the city to walk and we couldn't take public transportation without money. So most of the time we relaxed, talked, watched one of the two English channels on TV, or walked around. The full day that we were there we decided to just go on a walk and see what we would find. So we took off through the field behind the hotel.

This is the view from our hotel window. Talk about the middle of nowhere.

We walked through the field and saw these pony's, I liked their haircuts. Our hotel can be seen in the background.

This was the coolest house that we saw on our walk, outstanding shudders.

This is a traditional thatched roof home.

We saw quite a few beautiful gardens like this one.

After walking for an hour we reached Burgerveen, a very nice little village on a lake.

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This horse seemed huge after seeing the Romanian horses.

This donkey was kind of crazy, we could hear him braying from our hotel room!

We were glad that we decided to walk, otherwise we wouldn't have seen anything in the Netherlands except the airport, some highways, the hotel, and lots of fields. It was still a bummer that we couldn't go into Amsterdam though, because this was like a free mini vacation. In any case, we really just wanted to get home so this delay was pretty frustrating and stressful. We survived though, and made it home OK. Next time we travel we will be sure to take some emergency money, and to plan better for a delay like this. Hopefully it never happens again, but with the airlines these days, who knows?