It was about time. We had wanted to travel for years. Now, with just enough money saved so I didn’t need to teach summer school to get us through another year, we went to the Auto Club to plan a trip. People had always thought we’d been to Europe many times, some even thought we were from there, cultured Europeans come to Pasadena, didn’t believe me when I said I’d never been anywhere. So it was time.
We had read the books, seen the pictures, watched the movies. We were ready. Ready to find out, to enter the joy of an extended homeland and experience it at last as real.

We did everything right and in order. The tour planner charted maps and provided guidebooks. We got our passports with reasonable photos. We looked pretty good. We set up an itinerary with hotels and affordable alternatives in pensions and available rooms in private homes. We bought Eurail passes good for transportation all over Europe, even Greece, on trains and busses and ferries. We bought booklets of traveler’s checks. We went to classes in L.A. that taught us the ropes, talked about youth hostels and visas, how to pack light, leaving room for all those things we’d buy to bring back, even clothes we could wear there and back at home. They taught us about money belts, and pouches for valuables we could wear inside our clothes to be safe from pickpockets and cut purses. We bought phrase books so we could try to get by past the barriers for directions and ordering food. We priced airfare and stopovers and the polar route. We practiced not looking American tourist. Preparations were intensive and exhausting and took weeks.

I was pretty new to air travel, even the quick take off, where the stomach drops out, and then the triumph when the scramble for a window seat ended in your favor because the travel agent thought of everything.

It blurs a little in my memory because we took two trips to Europe, one next summer after the last, and it was forty years ago, and a lot has filled in since, and I was too young and inexperienced to take proper note of everything and fix it in my memory in order. I clutched my passport with a vengeance, because it validated me, and had a good picture.

So the plane trip itself was part of the experience, airplane food, in-flight movies with earphones. I don’t remember which movies. I don’t remember the food with precision, just that I liked it because they brought it to me and I like everything and I like to eat, famous for it.

And I think it was the polar route where we would fly non-stop over the top of the world and look down on ice and not much else for a long time. And walking down the aisle to the restroom partly for exercise, and partly for, you know. And maybe probably I took Dramamine so I wouldn’t get sick, as the doctor promised I wouldn’t. And how carry-on luggage fit in the overhead compartment in case we needed anything along the way.

And how we landed at Schiphol Airport outside of town, shuttle to the Airport Hotel because the itinerary knew we’d be tired from the flight. A sound night’s sleep between clean hotel sheets, and breakfast in the morning to the wake-up revelation of a real meal, full breakfast, which meant lots of food and lots of choices, Europe wasn’t token at all, and I was already in heaven and didn’t want to leave, but had to get on the bus (or was it a train or rail line?) into the city itself, and we got out in the big terminal (so I guess it was a train) and found a place to sit with our luggage and relaxed with coffee and the view overlooking the canals, and saw with surprise at the next table a friend from Pasadena, one of Shirley’s ballet students, with her little daughter playing by the railing, and we caught up and probably said, “Small world!”

You don’t expect to meet someone you know on the other side of the world, literally out of the blue. if I remember correctly, though the details don’t matter, and serendipity was what was present and real, and we sat looking over the canals and the passing boats which we knew we’d board in a day or two.

And here again memory blurs the sequence of events, because I remember clearly, vividly, the need to find a place to stay, a room to rent, when our itinerary after the Airport Hotel left the next choice of accommodation to us. And a somewhat elderly woman, with others like her on the platform, greeted disembarking passengers and offered rooms to stay, yes, it must have been a train we rode from the airport. Passengers were finding rooms, some going to the window where more official arrangements were made for rented rooms, but there was a line, and the woman approached with hesitant need, and we approached as slowly until we intersected and she told us she had a room available and we followed her. Her house was just a little walk away, and we carried and pulled our luggage, and entered a door, one of many along a line of doors to multi-story buildings, cheek to jowl and sharing walls like one long subdivided structure, chimneys in a row at the top, windows looking down. And we came in to what looked exactly like Anne Frank’s house, narrow stairs to a landing where a kind of toilet and sink off aside at the turning, and the stairs going up and up and finally our room and the relief that we had found a place to stay.

So we walked out into Amsterdam. We walked along a canal with our map in hand, went by the Rijksmuseum which was closed by a workers’ strike, so we never did get to see the great paintings we had looked forward to and had copies on our walls at home and in the big books on our coffee table. The Anne Frank House was highlighted on the map, but several blocks away, so we never got there either. We did stop at the Van Gogh Museum, which was open, and we gave it the time it deserved, all the paintings famous to us, in all the books, and others and others and others we’d never seen and didn’t know about. It was a chunk of the afternoon, and we felt ourselves lucky to see the under-side of Van Gogh which helped explain the tragedy.

And of course we went to Vondelpark, not just to pass by but to walk through, and then stop and sit on the grass with everyone in the city, mothers with their children running around, grandparents sitting back in the sun, a community park where democracy just is, in no hurry, and the famous reputation of Amsterdam inclusiveness, non-judgmental, comfortable togetherness, and we were part of it, and relaxed, and felt at home.

And it was getting dark and we were getting hungry and the canals could wait another day, and we had found by recommendation by guidebook and by mouth just the restaurant we wanted that had Rijsttafel in honor of the authentic Dutch Indonesian restaurant in Pasadena thriving when we arrived in 1970 but disappeared a year or two later because of the economy and not because of integration which was new in town. We were so lucky to have been there at the end, authentic Dutch Indonesian Amsterdam had reached out to us and now we were reaching back to the source and had one of the best meals of our lives, a feast really, almost endless, celebrating again the peanut as one of the basic food groups. We were so happy and impressed, as we drank the strong coffee, and told the waiter how wonderful everything was, even the coffee we were savoring, and the waiter disappeared into the kitchen and came back with an unopened package of the coffee as a gift for us to remember when we got back home.

That was Amsterdam.

We decided Amsterdam was like heaven. And we strolled through the city at night and didn’t care that it was getting late, and we strolled past the infamous red light district, a row of windows with actual red lights to make sure we knew where we were, shadowy men shuffling before the large plate glass. Women scantily clad in each cubicle, like a zoo, half-hearted illumination, the women utterly bored and tired, one leg lifted and resting on a chair to intimate the rest, the shadowy men hoping for a glimpse. It was all very sad and very unappealing and we walked on by.
We crossed a canal and found ourselves walking along new construction and piled sand, and then became aware of three darkened shadows of men following at a distance that was diminishing, and we walked a little faster, trying not to appear to run, and they came faster closer, and we could see the end of our lives in the dark side of Amsterdam, and we kept walking and there was more light and a bridge to the other side, and the men retreated. We escaped.

And returned home to the house with our room upstairs, and the land lady sitting at a round table downstairs in the kitchen, and she invited us to sit with her. We all knew phrases of several languages, and communicated as best we could, and found again the community we felt all over Amsterdam here in her house in her kitchen around her table, and she lifted her sleeve to show us the branded numbers from the concentration camp and we cried together and sang the songs we knew, and we were not tourists and never had been and never would be. And when we left we paid a little extra with added love.

And the canals. We couldn’t leave Amsterdam without going on a canal ride down and through the city, looking up on both sides to the high contiguous buildings, in rows like all of us seated in the boat listening to the voice that told us what we were seeing, and why it was important.

And we booked a little side trip by rail going further north, a tourist train that passed little road-side villages on display, costumed men and women farmers standing in their little fields in front of houses so little they seemed too small to stand up in, like a miniature stage-set by the tracks going by, the inhabitants appearing on cue as tourists waved and they waved back, like the Small World of a Disneyland North. We were told it was all real, they were actual farmers raising real food they would eat and we believed because we wanted to believe, and we decided we loved the whole country.

And we decided how lucky we were, how clever our travel agent had been, to start our vacation trip, our European Tour, in Amsterdam, to start with love, eager to see what’s next.