It’s 03:30 on Sunday morning, and suffice it to say that my circadian rhythm is seriously messed up. While I’m sure that things will settle down in a day or two, it’s annoying.
We woke up at 06:30 on Friday to finish packing things like toiletries and last-minute additions to our suitcase inventory, made it to PDX by 10:00, and the plane departed right on time at 13:20.
I managed to get this photo of Mt. Hood while flying over Washington State with the iPhone. I discovered a good argument for dedicated cameras is manual focus. The iPhone wanted to focus on the window pane, and I had to do some manipulating to get it to focus on the damn mountain, and even then it was a dynamic thing, going in and out of focus. I waited until the mountain could be seen clearly before clicking the picture and it took several attempts to get this result, and I’m still not quite happy with it.
While the seats in Premium Economy weren’t uncomfortable, I could not get comfortable enough to fall asleep. We made it to Amsterdam at 07:30 local time, and I just had to take this picture of the sunrise.
The starboard engine is illuminated so brightly because the landing lights were on, and that’s what the camera wanted to focus on. Fortunately, you can set the f/stop on an iPhone, so I cranked it as far up as possible while still getting the colors of the sunrise, giving a deep field of focus. Welcome to Amsterdam!
Amsterdam airport is huge! The aircraft taxied forever. Beth joked that we were going to get a tour of the city from the Airbus 330. We taxied for at least 15 minutes. Once we disembarked, things went smoothly. We breezed through passport control, and as far as we could tell, our luggage wasn’t searched. It was a short walk to where gofers from Viking Cruise Lines wrangled us into vans to take us to the docks.
Beth rode shotgun and reported that the driver ran through at least three red lights. Maybe it was the driver, or maybe Amsterdamers consider traffic signals to be mere suggestions, like New Yorkers. We only have the one data point, so it’s impossible to tell.
We finally arrived at the riverboat Viking Bragi but our stateroom wasn’t ready for us. We grabbed sandwiches in the lounge and tried to stay awake. By this time it was 11:30 locally and 02:30 in Oregon. Our stateroom became available at noon, and though the activities director announced that a tour of the city was available, we headed straight to bed. We only woke up long enough to participate in the mandatory safety drill.
We were instructed to put on the buoyancy vests located in the room. Instead of finding them in the convenient spot which was marked with a stylized life vest, they were stowed under the bed. Not just under the bed, but in the least accessible point under the bed, so that I had to get down on my knees, and then on my stomach to reach them. I am certain that this is a test to see if any passengers have orthopedic problems. I have abused my knees sorely in my lifetime, and they told me that there were only so many attempts to get the life vests left in their repertoire. So when the drill was over, I put them back in the spot with the life vest icon. However, while we were at dinner, house cleaning came in, made our beds, and threw the live vests back under the bed.
I told you: it’s a test. Considering that the average age of the passengers on this trip is about five years older than we are, I think it might also be an attempt at population control.
Memoirs of an Earthling 