The Never Ending Day – Day 1

The Never Ending Day – Day 1

Off to a great start – we were confused as to whether we should check in to our flight via Delta or its partner, KLM. Viking told me go through KLM via a chat bot. The KLM check in process failed – it referred me back to Delta. A second contact to Viking – this time via an actual human on the phone – agreed with KLM: Check in via Delta.

Ok fine.

Except Delta has this whole process to upload vaccine and testing info – with a not-so-subtle “reminder” that we should have started this process awhile ago. That would have been good to know, had Delta given us any kind of a clue.

Yada, yada, yada, two very frustrating hours later we had our boarding passes.

At least the drive to NY was easy. Finding the private parking lot by the airport was not. We showed up at the address on the reservation. It was not an “EconoPark”. It did not look like the photo on the website. A guy gave us another address where the actual long term lot was located.

I picked this lot because it has a 4.5/5 rating. I’m really hoping my car is there when we get back.

At the terminal we find the Delta representatives – who sent us to the KLM desk. Who asked us for exactly the same vaccine info we spent 2 agonizing hours entering into the Delta website. Yup.

The flight was delayed well over an hour because of the weather – the pilot taxied the plane around in circles. Once we took off, the flight itself was smooth, and the pilot was able to get us to Amsterdam only 45 minutes late. Enough to mess up everybody who had a connecting flight.

For anyone new to my blog, there will always be some adventure involving bathrooms during the course of our trip. Some are more ridiculous than others. I still regret not creating a travelogue based on the variety of flushing mechanisms I came upon in Europe during our Baltic Sea cruise. Eventually I learned to figure out the flushing mechanism first thing, to avoid….inconvenience.

Anyway, in the airport bathroom stall was this…thing….

It never did anything. I have no idea what it was or what it was supposed to do. Certainly creepy and unsettling.

Once we joined the Viking group, things proceeded a little more smoothly. Our bags were taken care of. We needed to show our test results at check in. We were taken to our stateroom by a very helpful steward, who managed to fail to mention we were supposed to immediately provide our first spit sample for the first PCR test. I stumbled across this bit of info a while later. Oops.

We met with my sisters-in-law, Susie and Janet, and Susie’s friend Tom. The five of us had traveled together on our last big adventure in 2019. We hadn’t seen Susie and Janet since Thanksgiving 2019. The gang was back together!

Of course, the first thing we did was have lunch – let the eating begin! The food was fabulous.

After lunch, assorted attempts at napping were made, some more successful than others. This was when I stumbled across the info in our room about providing the 1st day spit sample. Providing a spit sample is actually harder than we anticipated. And far more gross. But it will be a part of our daily routine for the next 8 days.

Before dinner we had our first briefing by the Program Director, Maarten (this guy has way too many “a”s in his name), followed by a confusing muster drill. G0d forbid there’s an actual emergency – so many people will be lost due to the inability to fish the life jackets out from under the bed!

Amazingly soon it was time to eat again – dinner time!

After dinner, we were beginning to fade – the never ending day, really needed to come to an end. We were able to watch the entertainment in the lounge via the live feed on the TV before we both just passed out.

Day 2 – Kinderdijk and windmills!