Colour on Colour

Last time we were in Amsterdam, we arrived in early May and that year, the bulb fields were 2 weeks early. Consequently, although we visited the Keukenhof Gardens, there were no flowers in the fields. This time, we planned to come in mid-April to make sure we got the fields in flower. The moment she heard we were doing that, my daughter eagerly jumped on the chance to come down for the day for a bike ride in the fields.

We left the house at 8:45 AM, early enough to catch the morning stillness.

Our canal

We picked up the bikes we found Saturday, and headed to the station. We bought our bikes day passes (€6 each), struggled through the turnstiles, and stuffed them on the train.

Ours on the left

You can take your bike on the train (weekends and non-rush hours), but my goodness, there's not a lot of space. The Sprinter trains have more space; you could fit 6 bikes in the one space on each of the two end cars. The fancier double decker IC trains fit only 3 bikes per car.

We headed to Haarlem, which is not close to the bulb fields but had other things we wanted to see. When trying to exit through the stations turnstiles, my OV-Chipkaart didn't work (what a surprise). I went to the NS service counter and neither Karen's nor my cards had actually been set up for use on the trains (not sure how we made it though to board in A-Dam). As I mentioned in the last post, the "automated" process to set them up was confusing as quantum theory, and what we did, didn't work. Sigh. I told the lady to make sure we were charged for the AMS-Haarlem run, but she said not to worry.

Out of the station, we went to the town centre and locked up our bikes. We started here to see the floats of the famous Bloemencorso Bollenstreek parade that took place Saturday, which is a celebration in the fields themselves of the flowers being harvested. There were at least 30 floats, and we each had our favourites.

Camels made out of bulbs 

Elephants on a Thai float 

Very well done 

A knight with a lance 

A giant pink pig makes it's debut 

The pig's curly tail

A harp. Note the "strings" 

One of the strings; note the building in refraction 

More strings 

Grand prize winning dragons 

The dragon on the other end with LED eyes

A Movie camera and clapper 

I had trouble facing this float 

There's a strong resemblence between the lady in the middle and the face on the left

Antherium wings

We were very impressed. While it was quiet when we got there, it was quite busy when we cycled away.

Cycling in the country in the Netherlands is much like cycling in Belgium; there are fietsroutes (bike routes) that run from numbered intersection to numbered intersection. Planning a route is as simple playing connect the dots (or at least it is when you can see the small signs directing the way). I was using the Fietsknoop app (highly recommended) to follow a route out of town. We rode for a while before arriving at the fields, some of it through beautiful woods...

Outskirts of Haarlem

...past fields with cattle that looked like an English Sheepdog with horns...

Scottish Highland Cattle, actually

...and past windmills.

How Dutch

I only got lost a few times; the signage is OK but not great. A little over an hour after leaving Haarlem's downtown, we arrived at the first of the fields, and of course, had to stop much as we would do for the rest of the day.

Yellow, but... 

Orange, red & green 

A heron despoils the picture 

Purple, white, pink and green 

Let the colours not mix 

This is monoculture at it's finest. Except when an errant bulb shows up, out of place. They are fun to find and fun to photograph: bulbs that "didn't get the memo".

Red in a sea of yellow 

This one can't decide what colour it is

A few hundred meters down the path was a field people were walking in. So we had to, of course. My daughter noted she was a "frolicker"; she like to frolic in fields of flowers. "Imagine, the daughter of two engineers is a frolicker," she said. 

They're not frolicking 

A lot of pink and white 

The one who didn't get the memo

Standing our from the crowd 

The crowd 

Impossibly red 

Two daffodils fight to survive the tulip onslaught 

Could you find your soulmate in a crowd? 

And so she frolicks

It was not the last time she would frolic.

Pick a colour, any colour

Turns out that visiting the bulbfields on a perfect sunny Sunday is a popular thing to do, whether you're on a bike like us, or in a boat or kayak...

Made me think of my friend Kim; her kayak is living in my garage 

There was a flotilla of kayak

...by horse and buggy...

A flotilla of horse 

A guided tour?

...or on rollerblades.

At least they match

There were bikers going fast and slow, one that was 145 km from home and still had 200 km to ride. It was popular, and moreso the closer you got to the pandemonium that was the Keukenhof Gardens, which was the 21 km mark of our trip. And yet, there were flowers everywhere...

More

...some of which were... furry.

Them's wierd 

This cultivar probably has a name

There were flowers of most every colour, and fields in most every pattern.

Orange 

When you have to bend around things 

The variation from white through pink to red 

Shades of purple 

Mixed colours for a change 

Daffodils 

Yellow to red to inbetween

There were reflective places, where the canals were peaceful.

An idyllic scene 

My daughter not frolicking 

Considering colour

Our plan was to ride all the way to Leiden, but we had a deadline to get back to A-Dam, and there was ice cream (and a bathroom) calling our name at Voorhout. So we stopped there, not "flowered out" by any means, and picked up a train back to A-Dam via a train change at Haarlem. Getting our bikes onto and off of the trains was entertaining, especially the busy IC train from Haarlem to A-Dam that already had 1 bike in the "this space fits 3 bikes", plus people with luggage going to the city. Whatever; we managed with the kindness of the Dutch.

Riding bikes through the bulbfields was a lot of fun, though if I were to do it again, I would pick a route that avoided the Keukenhof area like the plague. Yes, there are bulb fields there, but they're elsewhere, too, and the bike paths around there are crowded with people of all skill and experience levels.

And I do recommend frolicking, by the way. 

On the Road Again

Back to travelling after spending the winter renovating the bathroom. And, back to Amsterdam where we spent our month back in 2011 after we retired. We had ideas of other places to go, but my daughter is going to school in the Netherlands, and coming to ADam gave the chance to see her.

Our flight over was uninteresting other than we got to fly on Air Canada's newest airplane, the B737 MAX, on it's 2nd or 3rd revenue flight, on the Calgary to Toronto leg. We were on a 787 from Toronto to AMS; that bird was nice but my goodness, do the wings ever flex up during flight.

We got into AMS on time. We were supposed to be met at the airport by a driver sent by our accommodation, but after waiting 45 min, found he wasn't going to show. Instead we had lunch at the airport, then took the train in to town and walked over to the apartment. We tried to stay in the same place as last time, but it was not available. Instead, we are 2 canals farther from the station, but still in a beautiful canal house.

Living room 

Kitchen 

Bedroom 

Another view

Bathroom

A quick kitchen inventory told us we were short LOTS of things, but topping up would have to wait for groceries.

Our first day, Saturday, was spent in a mad dash to arrange things.

1. SIM card for the phone. ADam doesn't have many phone stores, other than a few of the biggies like T-Mobile and Vodaphone, who's SIM cards and plans are pricy. My daughter told us to go to a grocery store; our local Albert Heijn didn't sell phone cards that I could tell. The big Heijn in town near Dam Square (that was our neighbourhood store last time) did, however, only at the Service Counter. There are lots of "cheap brands" but the service counter folks knew exactly nothing about any of them. I got a Lebara card for €10, then paid €5 for 1 Gb of data I needed and another €5 because she didn't know if the card came with any talk or text (it did, so I didn't need it).
2. OV Chipkaarts: As I wrote here and here, these are confusing under the best of conditions and downright stupid at others. We got them at the GVB office at Centraal and were told how to validate them at the automated machines so they would work on the rail system, too. We tried but the process has so many steps that the lady glossed over that we would discover it didn't work the next day. Par for the course for OV-Chipkaarts.
3. Bike rental: We had plans to do a bike trip around the bulb fields and wanted to get bikes in ADam and take them with us. I found a place on line with cheap bikes but it was just impractically too far from Centraal for us to use. So we found another that has possibly the most expensive bikes in town (€13/day including insurance; I could have got them for €9 elsewhere) but were very convenient for what we wanted to do.
4. Kitchen gear: From cutting boards to sharp knives to an oven mitt to a measuring cup, we had a long list of basics to get. After trying some street markets, two dollar store/euro store equivalents, Xenos and Big Bazar, side by side on Kalverstraat near the flower market, came to rescue.
5. Groceries: My daughter was coming into town that night, so feeding her was the plan. On the bight side, we've done this here before, so between Heijn and Jumbo, we got a bunch of stuff. As expected, the grocery stores here are not like mine at home; far less selection, far smaller packages. But the prices are significantly higher than last time I was here; they are Canmore prices, only in Euros instead of dollars, so ~50% higher than home. Cheap wine is no longer cheap; very little is less than €4 any more.

Along the way, we had typical ADam experiences.

The canal in front of our house

Cheese in the market 

Mushrooms in the market 

Bike parking 

Who has the right of way? 

Traffic jam, ADam style

As we settle in, we are finding more things that are "issues". We have some burned out lightbulbs and no spares. The internet is good, but only works in the living room. We're short more things for the kitchen than we thought. The dishwasher beeps warnings to us that the manual -- in Dutch -- can't help us with; we have yet to make it work. We rearranged the furniture so we can better look out the window at the canal traffic, though the morning sun beats in the windows making it impossible to sit in the window before 1 PM. The bedding is WAY too warm for the 15° overnight temps, and there's no alternative to the monster down quilt, so the bed's either too hot or too cold (where's "JUST right?".

Still, we are here, it is warm (24°) and it is spring (it was winter when we left, and snowed yesterday).

Next up: riding with my daughter through the bulb fields.

Setting Up a Netgear R6400 to "Replace" A Time Capsule

As I wrote in this post, it took me quite a bunch of trial and error to find a router that could replace my TimeCapsule's functionality. I landed on the NetGear R6400 because:

• It has AC1750 class speed;
• It supports Apple's TimeMachine automated backup system

The NetGear's manual tells you how to set the router up to work with TimeMachine, but the instructions are a bit incomplete in that they skip an important final step.

The basic steps are as follows:

1. Format your drive to be compatible with TimeCapsule. This means the drive has to be an HFS drive (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) with GUID mapping. Be aware that from High Sierra OS 10.13, that is NOT the default format for Mac internal drives. A wise person starts with a new external drive and formats it correctly...
2. Next, set up the router as your new router, which is pretty straightforward and NetGear's instructions are good at describing.
3. After the router is set up, plug in that new, pre-formatted, external hard drive to one of the router's two USB ports. Both work; one is a USB 3 port so is faster.
4. In Finder, select Go --> Connect to Server...
5. Enter the path to the router, which is smb://routerlogin.net for the NetGear routers
6. Mount the drive, which will involve entering your router's admin ID and password. Make sure you check the box "Remember this password in my keychain"
7. At this step, Mac users will stumble into the ugly world of DOS. Sorry, your drive's name that you set up in Step 1, and the pretty name that shows up in the Finder when your drive is plugged in directly to your Mac, goes away. Drives will now map as R:, S:, T: or even "USB_Storage". If you partitioned your new drive, you'll get two letter choices, not one. In my case, I partitioned a 3 TB drive to 2 TB and 1 TB, the big one called "Backups" and the other called "Extra Storage". My 2 TB volume mounts as "USB_Storage" and the 1 TB volume mounts as "T:"
8. Enter Time Machine Preferences. Click Select Disk. Select the (now funny DOS-based) funny name of your backup drive. Close the preferences.

All of the above is covered reasonably well in Netgear's documentation, and is also describe in one of the FAQs here. Here's the next step that they miss:

Every time you shut down your computer, the backup drive disconnects, and is not seen when you start back up. Accordingly, Time Machine can't actually work it's magic in the background. You have two options:

1. Follow steps 4-7 EVERY TIME YOU RESTART YOUR MACHINE. Manual process. Ugly. Easy to forget.
2. Set the back up drive to connect automatically. Smart. Effortless.

Here's how to set up to connect to your new drive automatically:

1. Follow steps 4-7 above.
2. Open System Preferences --> Users and Groups and select yourself. You'll probably have to "Unlock to make changes".
3. Select the Login Items tab
4. In the Finder, drag the drive icon of your (now weirdly named) backup drive onto the Login Items window. Click the Lock icon to lock it in, then close System Preferences.

Done. Now, every time you start your machine up, your backup drive will appear if it can be found. I'm not sure at this moment what happens if you're on a laptop and away from your network; you might get an error message, you might not.