Oooooohhh aaaaaaaaa, Utrecht, the Netherlands....oh yea, Amsterdam, too

My worst fears have come true. Trish has found excellent shopping.  Our carefully packed knapsaks of 34lbs will soon heave. However she can't possibly buy anything heavier than the 12 glass chargers she made me carry back from Ecuador. We've  been going none stop and her head has been torrential so I'll carry another dozen chargers if she so commands. She's earned it.

 Utrecht is on our radar only because of Jessica and Hilco. She'a  biologist, an artist, a professor and a black belt traveller. Poor Hilco is only a furniture maker,, a runner and an engineer but also a master traveller. We kept running into them in Vietnam in 2009 and have more or less kept current. They've given us one of their downtown row houses for five days. We travellers look after one another.

Here she in in front of her 125 yr old house. Hilco has something similar a ten minute cycle away. You won't see any siding or even much wood construction here.

You can't really see them but Hilco made one of the tables and Jessica has some funky original oil. ceramic and wood pieces.

Amsterdam of 1989 evokes the sweetest and 'highest' of travel memories (did I just blow my PG13 rating?). For years I raved to Trish about that Amsterdam vibe, Vondelpark, the canals, the Koffee Houses....

Well as it turns out, Utrecht is unreal. It's smaller, compact, intimate and even more accessible than Amsterdam. All of a sudden this little 1300 yr old city has left Amsterdam as an afterthought.

Spider webbed with narrow canals and small winding streets, it's a wanderers delight, and that's about all we did for days.

Seventy thousand of the 300,000 population are students.

We did keep going back to KEEK, an organic bakery. On the Main Street. Most of you know curry is Kryptonic to Trish. But even she got into these bad boys....curried apple sausage rolls, in a delicate, flaky crust.

The major attraction is the Dom Tower, a 700 yr, 112 metre high Jenga block, and it's Cathedral. We love the lean simplistic gothic style here.

On our last night we had the mother of all splash out meals with Jessica and Hilco at De Heeren Van Leuw....or something like that.  This 4.5 star nouvelle cuisine joint on the lower canal's edge, brought out a surprise menu that included seared tuna wrapped in some prosciutto thingie, then melt in your mouth veal.

But wait, there's more. The Boy Wondrer Hilco and Jessica took us for a late night canal cruise on their stealth boat.

Sadly that was the end of our time together, this time. Wanderers inevitably cross paths again. We better.

But what about Amsterdam, you ask?

We did spend a couple of days there, even after Utrecht it was not to be avoided. Not that the Amsterdam vibe, the canals, the stunning architecture of the Rijksmuseum and its Rembrandt and Van Goghs were a hardship, they weren't. 

I enjoyed my bike ride, and Trish did her canal cruise. And we wandered along seedy Harlemstraat and its 'coffee shops'. Perhaps I was trying too hard to recreate that experience of 26 yrs ago, but we checked out some chocolate space cakes. Kinda yummy but they didn't nothing for Trish's migraine. Then we got hungry. Then I lost  my volume switch but suddenly I felt something that had to be called rhythm. Trying to blend in and look cool, we worked our way onto the right train home, only realizing afterward that it was a talk-free train. And someone had the giggles.

By the time we made it home, Trish was in full blown ogre mode.

Funny thing, since then she's suddenly developed a sense of direction. And she has this confidence and assertiveness with strangers. It balances out this unusual uptight travel mode I've had. Maybe I shoulda taken a six pack of space cakes to Prague? And gone dancing.

All this to say, Amsterdam was rather anti-climatic. Part of it is a clear romanticization I had for edgier, grittier scenes where a different buzz skewed my outlook. Now the more sanitized, genteelness of places like Utrecht totally works for me. 

Makes me wonder how I'll manage two months in Myanmar and India.