5 Cards Dealt to Amsterdam: January 2016

2015 ended without a great deal of fanfare for the Lewis family. We kept a pretty low profile - finishing up the semester at school, attending a couple of parties, and finishing up with a relaxing trip to replenish our dangerously low vitamin-D levels.

The End of the School Year
I'm going to bounce around a bit. Bear with me.

Picking up from the end of my last entry (from our trip to Santorini)... Our return flight was obscenely early; we left the room well before 5:00 am. When we arrived at the airport (which is tiny - like Bowman Field-tiny), there was no one at the rental car place. I found a guy that looked like he may work at the airport in some capacity. He told me to just put the keys under the mat, which seemed highly abnormal to me. But we had a plane to catch, so whatever! I haven't seen a €20,000 charge on the credit card - I hope that's a good indication that they got it back!

We had a SIX-hour layover in Athens, but since it was rainy we decided to stay in the airport instead of going to see the sights. That's a long time to sit around, especially on very little sleep.

Lucy crashed at the Athens airport. Fortunately it's a pretty good airport and we found some reasonably comfy seats.

Holli picked this up on her last trip to Moscow. How great is this?!?

Halloween, Amsterdam-style... A few (mostly American) families from one neighborhood host a trick-or-treat for the ISA kids. To help make up for the lack of houses participating (since this is NOT a Dutch thing), some other families volunteer to set up candy stations from their cars. It was incredibly well attended and the kids had an absolute ball! Some Louisville peeps may recognize Sarah - that's her car that Lucy and Eliza are pillaging.

Holli found this on the sidewalk at the Rijksmuseum. I wish I'd gotten to see it - the picture is pretty amazing!

I finally found a reasonably good mountain bike trail that I don't have to drive to. This guy must have been on guard duty for a nearby nest or for his main squeeze - I was within a foot or two of him and he was completely unfazed.

Eliza's class had a nice little party for her 7th birthday (see her in the hat?).

Later, Eliza loaded up her riding buddies before we headed out for a birthday dinner.
Notice the nice set of choppers.......

Lucy in heaven, halfway through a rack of ribs at Foodhallen - her fav!

After yet another pair of glasses bit the dust, we decided to try out the Dutch system.

The results add a few years. I LOVE this picture of her!

Remember that nice smile I pointed out just above? Well, that changed a little bit two nights later. Somehow, Eliza got her feet tangled with Lucy and fell - hard - into the steel coffee table. After freaking out for a little while (Holli and I as much as Eliza), we called Dr. Swain on his day off to beg advice. Fortunately, he and Holli have a great relationship (and he's an incredibly great guy) and he persuaded us that everything would be ok. The smile? Well it looked a little different.

This was the next day. The tooth stayed in for a while, but it was not hanging on by much.

Heart-shaped potato. Made Lilli happy!

So this was the cause of some confusion... I went up to the roof to check out the sunset and noticed that two chairs were apparently missing! This was very mysterious since there is no way to access our roof other than from our house or from someone else's roof. Well.... It turns out that we only had 6 chairs to begin with - one of them got moved to the other side of the table, which threw me off. =)

Another picture of the empty beach at the midpoint of my much-less-frequent bike rides.
The difference between summer and winter still amazes me.

Lilli and her friend Aspen have discovered Friends. It's funny hearing their discussions (20 years later).

Lucy after her haircut

And Eliza after hers.

Lucy had to make a machine that transforms energy from one form to another.
She designed a windmill and we built it from scratch. It actually works if the wind blows hard enough,
although we didn't try to grind any peanuts with it (it was modeled after De Zoeker)

The girls posed for a photo with this (unknown) car after a trip to the grocery.
Eliza is not as tall as many cars.

Holli collected the girls from school while I was out of town for business and since I took the car they rode the bus.
That did not stop Eliza from getting her nap in.

This is our new heater (both for water from the tap and for heating the house). It is a new one because the old one began leaking in the middle of the night. We discovered this when we began feeling water mist on our face in the bedroom below.
It was quite an interesting/ exciting few days dealing with this.

They do Christmas a little differently here. Sinterklaas arrives in Amsterdam in mid-November - on a boat on from Spain. He gets off the boat and parades through town either on foot or on horseback.
He is accompanied by scores of Zwarte Pieten (Black Petes - as in multiple guys named Pete) that distribute candy.

While this is unimaginable in the U.S., as these are white guys in black face, it is absolutely normal and a beloved tradition for the Dutch. And it is NOT considered racist by the locals.

Eliza got to do a little ice-skating at one of the rinks that materialize around town just as soon as it gets cold outside.

One of the many displays that are part of the Amsterdam Light Festival.

Getting ready to watch a football game - we were not able to watch many this year due to blackouts (?!?!?)
Thanks Obama! (or the ACC/ ESPN in this case)

The girls were all very excited about going home for the holidays.
Lucy made this countdown chart about 2 weeks ahead of time!

Holli tried to get some pictures for the Christmas card.

Some were better than others.

Eliza's Christmas party at ISA - they had several activity stations.
Here we made ornaments from oranges and cloves.

Another display from the Light Festival, which we toured by boat the night before we went home.
There was another head on the other side of the canal and they "talked" to each other.

Home

It's close quarters back in the Economy Class, but there was plenty of technology to keep us occupied for 8 hours!

Gina (and Joe!) came in for a few days. Joe was surrounded by kids while he was trying to destroy neighboring clans.
That's Jack Burns with Eliza and our neighbor Kaitlin next to Lilli. You can tell that he loved all the attention!
Somehow, this is about the only picture I could find during the
Sama family's stay with us despite Joe's birthday party a night or two later.

Dr. Bertolone hooked us up with some tickets to the U of L - WKU game, so I took the girls.
It was Eliza's first time and she had a ball.

Somewhere along the line, Eliza lost three more teeth over the holidays.
Thankfully, none of these three were trauma-related.

Holli's Birthday
We celebrated (the anniversary of) Holli's 29th birthday with dinner out with friends we hadn't seen in forever.

The Birthday Girl

The evening started out at El Camino where we enjoyed some drinks along with dinner.

And we ended the night at The Outlook Inn where we also enjoyed some drinks.
I wanted to make sure that she had this lined up correctly. She always appreciates my input!

Holli and R. Jeff

We packed up and drove down to see the Nickols family the day after the party. We figured out to hook up the home Blu-Ray player to our rental-van's entertainment center so that they (all 4 girls) could watch Star Wars IV on the trip down. This worked great until we stopped for gas - at which point we figured out that you can't control the player without a remote control, which I left in Louisville! So we had to sit through the first 1/2 hour of the movie again, and ended up arriving in Nashville with about 20 minutes left. Live and learn....

Unfortunately, after we arrived we did not do a whole lot of photographic documentation of the visit! The only photos I can find are from the brief trip to Opryland, which initially consisted of everyone but me, Josh, and John Nickols (Josh's dad, as opposed to his son!). The three of us took a side trip to a nearby kart-racing place where josh treated us to a couple of lapping sessions in an old warehouse. This was probably one of the top-5 most fun activities in my life (up there with snowboarding, scuba diving, and driving my car on a racetrack) - we all had a ball!

And then we drove over to meet the rest of the group (all 9 of them) at the Opryland complex. Wow.

Opryland. This is not a place I want to re-visit.

Fortunately, it seemed like most everybody felt like I did and we didn't stay too long. The rest of Nashville experience passed quickly, but we had a great time catching up, eating and trying out some of the Nashville brews (at least the older ones in the group).

We somewhat corrected my remote mistake before leaving as I was able to reprogram one of the house remotes to get the movie in the right spot (sorry Josh!). So the four girls got to finish part IV and were also able to watch Empire on the way home. And "we" completed the trilogy by watching Jedi in the Living Room a couple of nights later.

Despite the short stay in the 502, we did manage to fully deck out the tree!

Cousins...

Lucy's first effort with her new 3-D pen. Very cool new tech!

Post-Christmas, the rest of the family (and the Highfields) immediately headed south to Deerfield Beach, FL (near Ft. Lauderdale) for a week of sun and beach. I stuck around the Ville for an extra day since I didn't want to be in the air during the UK - U of L game. I ended up watching on the couch, solo, which worked out pretty well all things considered. U of L played a great game, as did UK. I think there's a good chance they will meet again in March or April.

This was easily one of the best Florida trips that we've had. The weather was perfect, the beaches were not too crowded, we had great company (Walda's sister Tina and her family live there 1/2 of the year) and it was very easy access (no dragging 300 lbs of stuff 1/4 mile down the road). And the ocean was warm, although I guess that's not a good thing anymore...

Walda instructing Lucy on the proper way to boogie-board. Tina and Holli off to the left...

Flanigan's is the place where, 10 (??) years ago Mom decided to drop in for dinner one night while on one of her legendary road trips. She unknowingly sat down at the bar near Tina, Jay, and Jerilynn (TIna's husband and sister) - but they had met only once, at our wedding some years before. Jerilynn slowly put Mom's face together with a name and started a conversation. A crazy coincidence that resulted in Jerilynn joining Mom on a trip to Key West!

Most of you won't see the problem here.
Ultimately it didn't matter much; the beat-down would likely have been similar.

After dinner on New Year's Eve.

Like all good things, it had to end and we made our way back to Louisville for just long enough to pack our things before heading back to the Dam. We're nicely settled in now, but it was a very difficult several days.

I'll close with some of the best shots that we've collected of the skies over the last few months. None of these are filtered or enhanced - this is really the way it looks, and it is easy to see how some of the greatest painters in history were inspired by living here.