Airfares were cheap and I hadn't taken a vacation in years, so I decided to go to Amsterdam for the Washington's Birthday holiday weekend. I added a few days of leave to the weekend so I left Dulles Wednesday on a 1730 flight and returned to Dulles at 1430 on Monday.

I chose Amsterdam for several reasons.

• I'm interested in architecture, cities, and history and I knew that Amsterdam with its great variety of old and new buildings would be interesting.
• I knew the central part of the city is compact & very walkable.
• The tram network is very good (for when I wanted to go faster or farther).
• The cultural attractions are many but not too many for a short trip to hit many of the highlights.
• I had two 18th-century etchings of views of Amsterdam and I was curious to compare them with the modern views.
• I knew that a monoglot American like me could get by because, on the whole, the Dutch are fluent in English.

A few notes about the photos. If you want to see a larger version of a photo, click on the picture and the larger version will open in its own browser window. The photos embedded in the web pages should be around 100-200 KB, but the larger ones will be between 500 and 700 KB. Fair warning.

Update JAN 2007: I've removed the large versions of the photos to free space on the server.


If for some reason you want to email me, the address is djmurphy@his.com

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