How many were there?

Say you are on vacation with your six-year-old. Also say that it's been hot---like 100  and up---and you like to do nice walking things on vacation, like museums, galleries, and other public sights. Let's add to this mixture a new museum! It won't have air-conditioning, but because enormous former palaces have cavernous rooms, it won't be so bad.

How shall we keep the six-year-old engaged with such a long walk around the Royal Museum of Art in Brussels? When she'd rather be sitting anywhere else? Well...we chose a scavenger hunt of sorts. And I imagine this would work with six-year-old everywhere.

Corrie got Camille to count the butt-cracks they could see in any sculpture or painting. It went from, Maybe this will work, to Oh man! Look how pissed those other people are! This is awesome! And Camille was fully on board.

I think the number settled on 27.

More Research in Needed...

There is a street parallel to our street, Elm, about two miles east:

Temple Ave. This picture is a Google map street-view pic along 4th, with the Irish bar O'Reilly's on the left and possibly my favorite little commie book shop, Page Against the Machine, on the right in between the palm trunk and the building.

Anyway, I thought it was maybe named for a temple of some kind, but in all the years we lived there, I never really found anything worthy of the name.

Then I found out it was named for early land-owner, pioneer, and rancher Juan Temple.

And I thought...Juan...Temple. Cool. Then I saw a photo of Mr. Juan Temple:

Well...this didn't strike me as what I would have expected as "Juan Temple." I know many of these early dudes were from Spain, and they're lookin' white more than many American's would guess, but still.

But then I saw some details of this dude, Juan Temple, and I figured a good story about him should be done. Maybe a prestige show, like the Parker Saga, would be interesting. Check it out:

• Born in Reading, Massachusetts in 1796 as Jonathan Temple
• Worked as a merchant in Hawai'i before 30 years old (possibly arrived as a missionary, but it is murky); captained his own vessel (1823)
• Ran afoul of local Hawai'ian leadership (possibly for smuggling or running booze to natives), had his property seized.
• Things died down, but he knew he should probably leave; 1827 lands in the coastal Mexican city of San Diego. Converts to Catholicism, learns Spanish, changes name to Juan, moves to the puebla of LA by 1828, opens first general store in what would become DTLA
• Marries into the powerful local family, the Corta.
• Bought a large piece of land from his wife's family, Rancho Los Cerritos; puts tons of cattle on it. His ranchero adobe was a few miles from us in Long Beach, and he had cattle from his hacienda all the way to the ocean, at least 20,000 acres.
• During the Mexican-American War, the American troops used his adobe in LB as a headquarters, After pushing out the Mexican military, they were less cool to the relatively loyal locals, and Temple's wife, Rafaela Corta, led the insurgency with bullets from her husband's shop.
• What the American's knew is still murky, because after insurgency, they made Juan Temple essentially the mayor of Los Angeles.
• Enlarged fortune with beef sales to NorCal during the Gold Rush.
• 1850s-era economic downturn caused trouble; then floods one year and a drought the next, and eventually they had to sell the Rancho Los Cerritos land.
• Moved to San Francisco and died later, in 1866. Rafaela Corta moved back to her daughter's place in Paris, France,when she eventually passed as well. (Juan and Rafa had a daughter, Francesca, who married a Spanish merchant, who eventually moved back to Spain, and then onto Paris, a city in which everyone in their family found lovely and enticing.)

The Rancho Los Cerritos house is free to visit, and literally down the street, Long Beach Blvd, er, maybe up the street, just over five miles away.

We'll go check it out after we get back from Texas, which we leave for, like, day after tomorrow.

So many treatments to write up, right?

Cass, IMAX, and Opening Day with the Stories We Still Tell

Around the year 2300 MHs, the kingdom of Ilias, or Troy, fell.

Or not. 

But for many reasons, stories about the fall of Troy, and defeat of said Trojan kingdom at the hands of the Achaeans (we call them Greeks) over a bride theft, has been one of the Western world's founding stories.

Why, out of all the poems or songs or pieces of storytelling is this historical piece the one kept alive by countless generations? Kept alive before most people could read or write, kept alive through the churn of history, and even today in the Iliad and the Odyssey, characters form this story are alive with us.

In the waning days of of the year 5507 MHs (yesterday), Cass and I attended an opening day, 3pm 70 mm IMAX showing of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey."

"Take a picture of the IATSE sign," Cass told me

That screen seemed the same dimensions as out television, but it was so freaking big. SO big. BIG.

The movie itself is also BIG. But I'll get to that.

Cass and I rode the train from our downtown stop in Long Beach to the Pico stop outside of LA Live and Staples Center Crypto.com Arena. We walked up to a poke´ place so Cass could try it, and then headed over to the Regal IMAX theater by LA Live. (LA Live is an entertainment plaza and studio-zone, kinda like Downtown Disney without that branding. ESPN Studios in LA is housed there, as is the Peacock Theater, and yesterday there was a special showing of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring.)

We got their early enough so that my mother would be proud, and we chatted. We talked. We talked about movies and books and history and sports. On the train into town I tried to explain why I liked Tenet more than The Prestige, whereas so many film nerds (like me?) prefer The Prestige to nearly any other Nolan film.

Cass asked me what my favorite Nolan film was. That's a hard question to answer, I told him. Inception and Tenet are such big swings, so original and bombastic. I loved the grandness of Interstellar, and the tight compact nature and structure of his three-hour biopic Oppenheimer.

Cass reminded me, "You may even like this one most," meaning the film we were waiting for. I nodded, That's right bud, finished my beer, got some popcorn, candy, and a slushee for the Boy, and we went and found our seat. We were dead-center, or just a seat over from dead-center, and in the very back-back row, the last row in the IMAX house

When I bought the tickets, it was either these seats or a much later show that I wasn't going to subject either of us to. I figured that in this spot, we'd be able to see everything.

And we were. Not being closer and more immersed, but what we could see was outlandish. Chest rattling bass, real boats in real sea water getting pounded, real people dealing with real wind on real beaches. This movie is strikingly beautiful, and especially with every frame nearly a spectacle, especially projected onto such a huge surface.

The set pieces are grand, and the use of CGI, while not non-existent, are reserved for the special moments. The cyclops, for one, was different than I expected, but I couldn't tell you what I did expect. But it was realistic and low-key terrifying way that should prep you for the Circe scene later. That scene boasts some awesome body-horror graphicness that had Cass wide-eyed in shock as it progressed, while I was like, Er, didn't expect to see this today. Needless to say, the weirdness of the cyclops did, in fact, not prepare me for the Circe scene.

Like Oppenheimer before it, Nolan here plays with the timeline and structure, so we get the story of Odysseus leaving for Troy, and like most accounts, almost nothing of the ten years spent on their siege of Troy. We get to see the Trojan Horse, the sacking of Troy, and the return home, but obviously not in that order. 

This is a movie about societal collapse, and about what happens when the social compact dissolves and is disrespected often and flamboyantly. In this Bronze Age tale, that social compact is known as Zeus's Law, which states that because you never know if a stranger is a god or not, you must be kind to visitors to your house and offer to share some bounty with them. This is usually scene as food and drink. Now, mix that social understanding with a staunch patriarchy and dozens of men (who avoided the Trojan War) who now view Queen Penelope as a prize, and you get a nonstop party of jerkass "suitors," unwanted and who understand that they will not be asked to leave. For years Penelope has to deal with this. The flaunting of the social compact.

The Trojan Horse plays a part in Odysseus's understanding of his role in the breakdown of society as well. it's also a late-movie set piece that Nolan has his fun with.

At a time this morning when I should gave been sleeping, I dove into scholarship on the Homeric Question, on the Epic Cycle, and even the Theban Cycle. [[Sidenote: My best memory or basic connection to Thebes is, honestly, from Disney's animated Hercules movie. But Thebes was an important Boeotian city, and Boeotia was an important part of Ancient Greece, and despite incorrect historical narrative that they were Philistines, you may have heard of some of the Boeotian myths and characters that have survived: Eros, Narcissus, Hercules, and Orion. Anyway...]]

The fact that the voice of the main narrative parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey seem to be in different dialects is one of the main pieces of evidence that most scholars use to say that attributing both pieces to the same person is incorrect. And yet Homer persists. Was he blind? Was the idea that he was blind stem from the fact that his name translates into "follower," but, in the other dialect is taken much more literally, as "blind?"

Some people see the history of the oral tradition in the Homeric Epics as well. Bronze Age details with an early Iron Age view. As the story is told, over and over, keeping the histories alive and meaningful for the living, as Matt Damon's Odysseus says, "It's so those that can't read can know," the stories invariably change. And this is to be expected.

Was there a Troy, an Ilias? Was it weakly sieged for a decade and then lost in a torrent of fire and murder because of a false gift? That's the story that seems to still be with us, three-thousand years on. And I return to the question I posed near the beginning: why this story? Is the question really "why the Trojan Cycle the most?" Is it because it's about love, scorn, honor, hubris, denying the gods and then acquiescing to the realities of world you can't control? 

The movie we watched yesterday is an interesting reflection on what it may have felt like to live through the general Systems Collapse of the Late Bronze Age, and that's the fun part of the big picture, I think, anyway.

That, and where else can you see Matt Damon out on a raft made of ten pieces of picket fence nailed together out on the open ocean? Like, literally out on the frickin' ocean, waves washing over his face, projected as big as an airplane on the side of an indoor building?

As we rode the train back to Long Beach, our seats with our backs on the sun and and our faces shielded, Cass nearly fell asleep on my shoulder. The one thing keeping him awake was the train's voice. The stop-announcer on our A-train, our local light-rail, was off by four stops, and Cass stayed up and mentally grappled with it, even nailing his own prophesy, when someone almost missed their stop because they were relying on the voice and video offered by the train.

Our long journey home was fraught with misinformation, and I smirked at the thought. Our systems in this day and age are fraying, our social compact buckling under the weight of a leadership class that flaunts it for profit. The failing of the machines is just a symptom, one that plenty people ignore happily. 

That's was also probably what it felt like in the beginning of the Systems Collapse event. 

But there are some kids playing attention at least, kids like Cass who are SO eager to learn the stories of the past, the stories we still tell ourselves. He's starting early. He knows the road is long, but his appetite is sufficient.

Detritus of the Brain from Our Visit to Europe

1

The Smurfs! Oh my goodness, I forgot the Smurfs.

In the 1958 the Atomium was finished and opened in Brussels. But something else debted that year as well, and they were also a Belgian creation, "Der Shtrumpfs," which was later Anglicized as "The Smurfs."

I had no idea before going that the Smurfs were a Belgian thing, like mayo on fries, huge-dimpled waffles, and angry French/Dutch.

2

I meant to find and share the following slide. I took the picture with Corrie's phone and sent it to mine, lovingly referring to it as "Nerd stuff:"

It was from the conclusion of our Japanese speaker's talk, where he discussed how feldspar, a mineral that makes the occasional crystal, can split light beams and cause a doubling effect, which was a thematic element of Pynchon's Against the Day. In this diagram is the conclusion of his thesis, about how Pynchon arrived at the name of "Umeki Tsurigane" for a character in AtD, how it came from Madame Butterfly and the combo of the 1954 novel and subsequent 1957 film of Michener's Sayonara.

The whole thing captures well the depth of the Pynchon party every two years.

3

I knew I had this picture somewhere:

This is from Aachen, and is the collection of attached buildings that survived the allied bombing during WWII and originally date back to before 1000 CE.

Here a postwar pic:

4

I tried to take this crazy reflective picture off an orange glassed sculpture in Brussels. It didn't work out so well, but here we are:

I reserve the right to keep adding anecdotes, because I feel like I still had at least one more story left. I just can't remember.

Table of Contents for Germany and the Low Countries 2026

 International Pynchon Week 2026, Dortmund, Germany, baby!

1. Just got home
   
2. Introduction
3. Numbers Fun
   
4. Day Zero
   
5. Dortmund
   
6. International Pynchon Week 2026
   
7. Aachen
   
8. Brussels
   
9. WTF Watches
   
10. Antwerp
    
11. Amsterdam
    
12. Journey Home
    
13. Staying in Epic Places
    
14. Graphic Novels, and the Missed One
    
15. BEER!
    
16. Laundry
    
17. Field Trip to Coal Mine
    
18. Movies on a Plane
    
19. Conclusions
    
20. Detritus of the Brain
    

We made it! There and back!

(Updated)

All in All...

Holy hell, a fantastic trip!

Originally part of the plan was to visit Bruges and possibly Ghent, but as the heat dome settled down on us in Dortmund, we called an audible and decided to skip both. Too much time in a bus on multiple days.

The kids did well, but obviously not every second was sunshine and happy times. We rode bikes, we painetd pictures, we ate some exotic grub, and we sweated the sweat of weary Yanks. We watched soccer and some of the Dwayne Johnson Hercules movie.

Cass found numerous young ladies with which he could start conversations. Camille painted pictures and made jokes, and both kids kept up quite well with our shenanigans. They may have been complaining and bitchy for plenty of it, but they made it all the same, all seven to twelve miles of walking a day.

Hopefully the memories will be there for our youngest. I think they'll be foundational for Cass. Time will tell.

Good times, for us, for sure. We've been at it for a few years now, but...I guess this is what we do.

Movies on Planes

As I round out the collection of pieces from our European adventure, I thought I'd mention some movies that I saw on the airplanes. 

Back in 2019, I saw Dog Day Afternoon for the first time on the airplane to Rome (and watched it on the way back, too).

The big movie for me this time was this year's Oscar nominee "The Secret Agent:"

I watched the first forty minutes without sound, for lack of headphones, but since it's subtitled, it didn't really matter.

Have you seen it? It't hard to describe. It sticks with you, which is something. The opening scene has our star, Oscar nominated Wagner Moura, driving a VW Beetle into a gas station outside of Recife, in northern Brazil, during Carnival in 1977. The corpulent worker wearing a shortsleeved button-up shit with no buttons buttoned, fills his tank and explains why there's a corpse in the parking lot covered with a sheet of cardboard. Cops do show up, but not for the corpse ("They'll be here soon for him," they say), but really just to extort Wagner Moura's character. He gives them his remaining cigarettes. 

It's engaging, but hard to explain why, and the whole thing is like that.

I also watched, fully silently, a little Quebecois movie with the translated name "Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person:"

It was fun and silly.

Lastly, after I did get some earphones, and after I finished The Secret Agent, I watched one of the Kenneth Branagh's Poirot movies, "A Haunting in Venice:"

When I saw it had both Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh in it, I thought, hell yes. It's both a haunted house story and a murder mystery, and it's filmed sumptuously in Venice. 

I've tried to find all three since we've been back. Tough crowd right now, anyway.

Forgot one!

I thought we had another graphic novel purchased on this trip:

We purchased this at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. It's done in a comic style very reminiscent of Herge's Tin-Tin.

I haven't finished this yet, but it has a young man looking around his grandmother's attic for items that he could use to celebrate her on Queen's Day (a Dutch celebratory holiday, on the sovereign's birthday). While looking around he finds some pictures and some evidence that, eh, there are some secrets in the pasts of his ancestors. Like trying to keep a small family of Jews hidden from the occupying Nazis.

It's harrowing and sobering at the same time, like much of the Dutch approach to their checkered past in the tropics.

This was in a bag that wasn't looked through until today. Whoopsie!

Field Trip to Zeche Zollern

This was the field trip to the coal mine in Dortmund. The Zeche Zollern coal plant was the first that ended up powered by electricity. The weather was beginning to warm up, and the tour guide spoke only German (our original English-language tour guide fell ill), but it was a fun time.

We rode the bus through Dortmund for an hour, which helped inform my view of regular life in that western German city.

"Zeche" is a German term that means 'colliery' or 'mine,' and "Zollern" refers to a German royal family, a noble family, the Hohenzellern, that dates back to the 1200s-ish.

Anyway, the whole area was modeled after a noble courtyard:

But, of course, the central building housed the mine officer's offices, which had a panopticon effect.

Inside some of the buildings, which were modeled after cathedrals, the stained glass windows were adorned with images of labor:

The workers were all assigned a chain basket within which they would store their clothes for the day. They would, using the chain, pull down their basket, change clothes, and pull it back up to the rafters:

This is one of the main coal working centers. The diagonal lines were for pulling elevator chords, elevators for both people and for coal. 

It was said that if you were not at roll call in the mine at 6 am, you wouldn't get paid for the day. The best way to make sure you were at roll call, was to take the Men's Elevator. If you slept in, or otherwise missed the Men's Elevator, you'd have to take the last coal elevator before roll call. The Men's Elevator went at a respectable 40 kph (about 11 mph), but the coal elevator rocketed down at 70 kph (nearly 20 mph).

There was a large transformer room, with cool gears and capacitors and all kinds of cool electro-mechanical stuff.

I tried imagining the sound and the action of the place in full working order. 

But then it's hard to ignore the Allied-forces pummeling Dortmund took as a center for coal industry and munition factories. It's almost surprising any of the old infrastructure still exists.

Dortmund was picked as the location for the IPW in parts because of a quote from Gravity's Rainbow: "Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet," that, and a university's faculty that loves and teaches multiple classes in Pynchon's works.

Besides a snafu on the way home, this was a great little trip, and to see the inner workings of an energy industry that's now a museum. It was said that it had to lay dormant from the postwar period until the 1990s before they figured they could turn it into a place for learning, or before they learned how to do that, and once the realized that people would come to learn.

On the day of this field trip I had Corrie's phone. She had mine to take back to the SIM card people to make it sure it would work. Hers worked, and for that day we switched. She got mine working, and we switched back, but not before I took a handful of pictures that took a while to get access to. 

Germany! Trying to come to terms with their own monstrous shadow in real time.

Laundry, In Three Parts

 The First

Friday. It was hot. Super hot. Sweaty. The last things for the IPW were done early, and later we were going to go to Domicil and see a violin show. I walked down to the laundromat and tried to figure the system out. You had to choose the machine on a screen. Then pay on the screen, then walk over to the machine and press start. It was 9€ per wash (yikes!), but he dryers were only, like, one euro for 12 minutes, but one dryer didn't get hot at all.

Ahh, domestic duties.

The Second

We were leaving the next day from Brussels, and the need was there again to get the piles of sweaty clothes through the washer. I put eyes on while we were walking around town the day before, or earlier in the day, and it was similar to Dortmund in that it was on a screen where you have to choose, and pay, and get change. I took the kids with me, but then Corrie finished up her museum visit and came and got them, as I sat, sweaty, wearing my swim trunks, their mesh undergarment making the time unpleasant.

The Third

We were heading home a few days later, but the kids weren't going to make it with their underwear, and so I headed out again one bright evening in Amsterdam, with the heatwave having mostly broken. This was the closest spot, and there were very few washers or dryers, and I'm not sure if anyone using it while I was there lived in the neighborhood. Again, it was expensive, and again it didn't work very well, but...that's the job.

No place took cards---all were cash only. That could be challenging, but we made it work.

Nothing like laundry while abroad, baby!

Pub Crawl Guide and Beer Discussions

In Antwerp we ended up in a bar after we left the kids to watch one of the tablets with the third Sonic movie. It was hot outside and very hot inside, a cube of wood and posters. There were four patrons, the bartender, and the two of us. Of the four, two were Americans visiting from a cruise, their pub crawl guide, and his friend, who had shown up to help out, or just join his buddy and his crew. Since that crew was just a single couple, it had been a very personal pub crawl.

Once we all started talking, we ended up learning some things from the pub crawl guide.

He told us a story about how Belgium became the king of beer countries, in that, the country with the most brewers per capita was Belgium.

After the French left, and after the final breakup with the Netherlands was consummated, in the new Kingdom of Belgium it was apparent that elections needed to happen. The two main factions were the conservative Catholics and the non-conservative others. But the elections showed the reality: the most popular folks up for election were brewers. 

The brewers won the first elections. They were the most popular candidates, they had the most name recognitions and positive vibes. To win in Belgium, people realized, you'd have to be a brewer. More people joined the ranks of the beer makers, just to be more palatable for political votes.

And this is why Belgium is the King of Brewers.

We drank plenty of beer while in Europe, and we tried more Belgian beers than normal. They were complicated and pleasant. 

At Mikkeeller's the second time I had a Bubblegum Bottles from the Scottish brewer Vault City Brewery:

I didn't take this picture

We were talking to the very cool bartender for a while. The young lady was local and her boyfriend was from London. He didn't like the fresh fruit, which led me to think he may have been south Asian. He was trying to learn Dutch. Maybe he did okay with listening and understanding, but speaking wasn't there yet. She seemed happy and content.

She'd had another boyfriend that got married somewhere crazy, or had someone close to him married somewhere crazy. It helped with her backstory.

She helped me understand the hard-I (ee) "ij", and we talked about language, like what she was forced to learn (German and English). 

When I ordered this beer she smiled. "Yeahp. That's a good one." She poured the shot of beer, 25cl, a cup, her back to me. She turned, "And the color. The color gets people." And she put it in front of me.

Blue. It was blue. The foam was like spirulina foam. 

But it was good. So good. It was just...refreshing and acidic and sweet, and balanced. Bubblegum, but, like, sour, and balanced. I've even looked at getting some since we got back. No dice.

They don't have La Chouffe here either:

This one either

And...that makes me sad. Maybe I should actually look. 

In Germany I bought beer from the gas station across the main street up from where we stayed. Used coins. I bought Bitburger, Carlsburg BIG, and whatever else random 1.69 € pint cans they had.

And now we're back to big IPA country. And brewers maintain a safe distance from politics.

Carrying Around a Library of Comics

 Cass brought his copy of Tankers, a comic:

It's bonkers, and fun, and silly, and when Cass said he wanted to show "that girl" the gory pictures, and motioned to Irina, a cute young Serbian girl who had just finished her talk on Pynchon and Lewis Carroll/White Rabbits, I smiled and chuckled and said, "Cool, man. I'll go introduce you."

Anyway, on this trip, we ended up picking up various graphic novels, and they are all pretty cool.

The first, from Brussels:

This Tin-Tin story is a classic English version. First, let me say: I grew up watching Tin-Tin on HBO and enjoyed it, and have read a few different English editions as well. This piece had very little Tin-Tin. I mean, he's in it, and he's running the show, but it's mostly Captain Haddock yelling and screaming at people about the lack of whiskey, and Prof. Calculus. It's Calculus's first appearance, and he's one of the more annoying characters I have encountered un sequential art. He's mostly deaf and does nothing about it, besides mis-hearing everyone.

The next graphic novel we got was from the Anne Frank house.

I also bought our own copy of Anne Frank's diary. That girl could seriously write.

The next graphic novel was a rendition of the last few years of one of our favorite painters:

The lady at the Van Gogh museum  asked if this book was for me. "It's eh...it's not for kids..."

I checked it out. It may be a bit mature, but it isn't too far gone.

Epic Places to Stay

Corrie found some incredible places for us to stay. The AirBnB in Dortmund was a nice slice of home, and it was easy for us to slide in there and feel like we were doing a home-away-from-home thing. If we were to stay longer, we would have had to better figure out the cooking dinner part, but as it was, it was very nice.

Stairs, two bedrooms, a quiet street down from a park, and close to both a university-bound bus and the town center-bound subway.

Here's a shot Corrie took of us before we took the subway into to town to see the show at Domicil:

Zoom in pretty far

There we are!

The hotel in Aachen wasn't super-spectacular, but it was nice enough, had a fancy buffet breakfast so the kids could choose their own food, and was close to everything we wanted to do. It was also the site for a very pleasant evening of drinking beer and watching Germany play a World Cup game, and the resulting honking, even if my video in the earlier post never worked.

The hotel in Brussels was close to a tram stop that itself was close to the stuff we wanted to do there. It, the B and B Hotel Brussels, was chosen because of the cool stuff for kids. The swings in the lobby, a popcorn machine, the bunk beds carved into the wall, and another breakfast buffet. You're eating how many croissants?

All of those places were nice. But the AirBnB in Antwerp was freaking epic. Right on the square in an ancient building, with a view that I couldn't get enough of. I mean, I tried to be chill, but...

4 pm

10 pm

11 pm

8:30 am

10 am

It was like staying right on top of Times Square, if Times Square wasn't all about consumerism, full of automobiles, and in fact five-hundred years old.

I even found myself taking pictures of the room from the ground level, the four windows above the Rooden Hoed, at all hours of the day:

So...I may have had a few drinks in between some of these pics, but it was magical.

And then the Dikker and Thijs in Amsterdam. It sat on the corner of the main roads, the Leidsestraat, and the main canal, the Prinsengracht. That's it there, centered:

But our room was the top! The corner window and the two on both sides. It was super cool:

It was even above the tower on the left. 

See? And check 

The room key was made of balsa, and after that night where it rained heavily and my clothes got ratehr soaked, it warped:

It went back to normal by the end, which is pretty cool.

The room was featured in the screens on the elevator:

Well, not really...actually, that's the room below us:

This was the best, most epic hotel I've yet to stay in. And I know the kids don't appreciate it. The AirBnB in Antwerp? Holy hell, they may never understand that either.

Corrie killed it on this trip.

The Multi-Day Journey Home

Traveling long distances too a foreign destination, while often strenuous, if tempered by excitement, and this positive energy permeates one's entire outlook and disposition.

Returning, on the other hand, is after you've been away from home for however long, the stress accentuated if you have kids. For us, this is where the trip went super sideways.

We had an overnight layover in Toronto, and had plans to stay is a hotel in the middle of the city, walk about for a while and find food, and settle in for an easy night sleep and return to the airport the next day.

So, obviously that happened, right?

Firstly, we had to say goodbye to our epic hotel, the Dikker and Thijs, in Amsterdam:

Return the bikes, and see the public urinal that I remember being in mre places backj on '05:

But, it turned out that the Amsterdam airport sucked to get to, sucked to get through, had terrible signage in the tram stations, shuttle train (the sprinter) stations, the customs area, and inside the international terminal. After chatting up a worker, me trying my best to hide my anger and frustration, he led us to a different line, and we made it through quickly. But our terminal, once we realized where it was located, despite the terrible signs, was at least a half-mile away, and we had to run to make it.

Like a terrible movie.

We made the flight, and headed towards North America.

Hours later, as we approached Toronto, I noticed the fliught icon of the plane, as it appeared on the video screen if you didn't want to watch anything had been settled on 25 minutes for nearly an hour. Twenty more minutes and the trubulence started to get bad, and the pilot came on the intercom. He informed us that yes, we were circling, that briefly Toronto's airport had been closed due to the turbulence-inducing thunderstorms, and that we may be rerouted for Niagra Falls. This elicited a groan, in between nervous oohs and aahs as the cabin lurched in different directions. "We, aaahhh, have, probably enough fuel for that," the pilot said.

Great. 

The bouncing of the cabin in the turbulence for over half an hour led to half of the kids on the flight barfing into their barf bags. Our kids were okay, but it was touch and go with Camille for a few minutes.

When we were finally cleared to land in Toronto, we did, but then got stuck on the tarmac for a while, and then it was announced that there had been a medical emergency on the plane and we'd have to wait for the paramedics to arrive and get the person off first.

Another groan, but at least we had plans. Of course after another half-hour of waiting, no paramedics arrived, and the pilot forced them to let all of us off. At least we hadn't missed our flight---it was the next day. We had to gather our bags since...in Canada apparently, you have to get your bags and put them through customs again.

So...find a cab. Get to the hotel. Drop off the stuff in the room and eat in the hotel restaurant. It was 9:30 local Toronto time when we finally got food, the US was playing Bosnia on every television and a loud contingent of Croatian fans were singing as they prepped for the next day's match against Portugal in Toronto. 9:30 is tough for food, but it was 3:30 am for the kids.

The high-rise density surpasses DTLA

The CN Tower and the Roger's Center

Once the kids got to bed and we had a beer, we went up to bed, mercifully ending a long-ass day.

The next day, as we flew into the sun some more, we passed over part of the Grand Canyon, and eventually made it home after a long taxi ride. Gotta love the 405.

Picasso was very glad to see us, and finally let up on his clinginess.

I tried to get to these posts before too long, as it happened with Southeast Asia back in 2014, or Rome in 2019, things quickly recede to dream status in our memories, and typing these up has allowed me, or forced me, to reflect on them as if I were discussing them with friends or family.

I have a few more posts to go, mostly asides like epic places to stay, beer discussions, movies on the plane, and the field trip in Dortmund that I didn't have the camera for. Anyway, the bulk of the pictures and time overseas is up, in narrative form, and all that's left is to fill in the blanks that only I can see.