Excess Baggage

Today, we decided to put five bags into a storage unit, to be collected again once we have our car. It’s the same number of bags we checked through from Newark Airport and the same number of bags we’ve felt embarrassed to be carting around ever since. Once our car arrives on the boat from the US (Baltimore, MD to be exact – but that’s another story) we can pick up our things, throw them in our hatchback and merrily move along. For now, though, there was simply no way for us to explore Holland with it all in tow. The super-friendly owner of the hotel we’ve been staying at, Henk, offered to give us a space to store our belongings for as long as we needed. “It’s free!” he reasoned. While he had an excellent point, we felt like we were taking advantage of his kindness a little. So, we opted for a storage unit instead – a decision that one can make on the first day of their budget. If this were, say, Day 12, I'm sure we would have taken ole Henk up on his offer.

Henk set us up with a wonderful taxi driver, Eppo, who brought us all the way to the outer boroughs of Amsterdam, which reminded me of Queens, in search of City Storage. We had tried to reserve a storage space online and hadn’t heard back. Merlin figured, let’s just show up and see what happens. Well, what happened was we found a skeleton of a building right where City Storage was supposed to stand. Apparently, the place burned down a year ago. Makes sense that they never got back to us. At this point, our driver decided to call his mother and ask if she knew of any other storage spaces in the neighborhood. I call my mother for things like this all the time, so I appreciated him doing so. I also appreciated that he had her on speaker phone. She sounded like a lovely woman and wound up giving us some pretty great mom advice, “There’s probably another one right there.” Sure enough, around the corner there was.

We are now five bags lighter and ready to visit Lukas and Judy, our Amsterdam contacts whom we’ve never met. We’ll be spending the night on their houseboat and will no longer have to worry about sinking it.