It was in May of 2022 when I finally got to spend a week in Germany, my long awaited return trip after moving back to the States. Long before I knew when I'd be doing this, I'd already known it was going to be split between Stuttgart, the city where I used to live, and Munich, the biggest city I didn't do a big trip to.
I'd wanted to do this trip after the Suwannee Hulaween festival in 2021, but didn't get my passport renewed in time. As 2022 began and I started making plans, I then thought about using this as the detox week after the Bass Canyon festival in August. But then as I kept hearing about people I worked with in Stuttgart moving back to the US one after the other, I knew I had to do this sooner. Finally I decided on the third week of May.
When I put together the air portion of the trip, I wanted to do this in only four flights, two there and two back. Also, I wanted to use reward points as much as possible because flights were quite expensive. Maybe it was inflation, maybe it was super-high post-pandemic demand, probably it was both, if I had paid full price for the whole airfare it likely would have been around $4,000, which is more than I'm willing to pay for a round trip to Europe. Fortunately I had enough reward points on different airlines to cover...most of it, if not all.
I wanted Amsterdam to be my arrival point and take trains from there. It was around that same time in 2022 when the Netherlands' national airline, KLM, announced a new direct service connecting Austin and Amsterdam, thrice a week in each direction, so that looked like a great candidate for the second of the four flights. Since KLM is part of the same alliance as Delta, and I have a credit card that earns Delta points, getting this flight without paying any actual money would be no problem, and I built my trip around this.
The first flight would be from Amarillo, Texas to Austin on Southwest, paid for with my Southwest RapidReward points. Of course, there was the standard $11.50 Southwest charges for any of their flights you pay for with points. Then, after a long layover would be the second flight, the aforementioned Austin-Amsterdam flight on KLM, paid for with Delta SkyMiles. Trains would take me from Amsterdam to Stuttgart to Munich to Frankfurt over the ensuing week, and this cost a total of 100.70€ (back then, about $104.67, but the Euro has lost value since then). At the end of the trip, the third flight would be from Frankfurt to Dallas/Fort Worth on United, and since I didn't have enough United points for it, I had to pay the hefty airfare of $1,548.17. Ouch! That's only a single one-way flight, but it wasn't that long ago that you could do a round trip including connections for less than that! Well, I can't complain too much, since that was the only flight I was paying for with real money and that seems like a reasonable price when you consider it's less than half of what the full airfare for all four flights would have been. The fourth and final flight was from Dallas/Fort Worth to Amarillo on American, paid for with American AAdvantage points.
Monday, May 16, 2022 - Austin
My flight out of Amarillo was leaving at 7:00am, though since I live in New Mexico, that's 6:00am to me and I had to wake up super early. It's an hour-and-a-half drive from Clovis to Amarillo, but thankfully there wasn't much traffic that early in the morning and AMA being a small airport, it wasn't necessary to get there more than an hour before departure.
I landed in Austin at 8:25am. Since I had seven and a half hours before my flight to Amsterdam, I collected my luggage and left the airport to hang around Austin for awhile. Bus 20 took me from the airport into the city center. I wasn't sure where I wanted to step off the bus, but since it stopped and the driver took an unexpected break somewhere around South Congress Street, I decided to step out there.
Just a few steps away I found a café called Bennu Coffee, where I had a blend they called Grizzly O. Then I walked several blocks down South Congress to see what I could see. This was a part of Austin I hadn't explored much during my many past visits to this city, when I lived in San Antonio. There were a lot of nice-looking shops and restaurants lining this street, but it was so early that hardly any were open yet.
At the intersection of Gibson and South Congress, looking north with the Texas State Capitol off in the distance.
Some artwork on the side of Home Slice Pizza.
Eventually I turned around and walked north, crossing the Colorado River on the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge.
Here I have to mention that the weather in Austin that day was unbearably hot. It was only the middle of May, but the temperature was in the upper 80s and the air was somewhat humid. That morning and afternoon I sweated quite a bit, which gradually contributed to a thin layer of grimy grease covering me all over, and all the while I knew I would have to sleep in it during the long trans-Atlantic flight. This is where I realized I could never live in south Texas again. As much as I love Austin and San Antonio, the only way I'd ever move back is if they could both be transported into the Rockies.
In downtown Austin I found another place to have a coffee, and while walking around I actually spotted a robot rolling around on wheels, at the intersection of Sixth and Guadalupe. Austin really is becoming a tech hub. It was zipping away from me down a sidewalk, but I managed to get one picture...
It was already pretty far from me by the time I snapped the pic, so I had to enlarge this part so you can see it. It looked like a cooler on wheels. Was it delivering something?
Back on South Congress, I looked around for somewhere to have lunch. There's a relatively new collection of upscale stores and restaurants at South Congress and Academy, with a little street called Music Lane running through it. Here I found a restaurant called Aba Mediterranean which was my lunch stop, and the last place on this trip I'd eat anything on this side of the Atlantic.
With my departure time about four hours away and inching closer, there was nothing left to do in Austin but catch a bus back to the airport. After checking my luggage and going through the security line, I had time to walk around the terminal a bit. Austin-Bergstrom is a quite new airport; it was built on the site of an Air Force base which only closed down in 1993. Today it's quickly becoming a major international hub, as the Austin area grows rapidly.
The inside of the terminal has a look and feel that is very much Austin. It's hard to put this into words, but if you live in or have ever visited Austin, you know what I mean. If you've ever walked down South Congress or Barton Springs, you can see there's a certain style to the restaurants and shops, and the lit-up signs on these places. The terminal in Bergstrom airport is designed to resemble this.
With the time I had, I not only got my third and final coffee of the day, but also stopped by a bookstore where I finally bought something that had stood out to me for years: Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I'd been seeing this book at just about every airport bookstore, and at least one train station bookstore, I'd even flipped through parts of it once, but every time I passed it up...until now. There was going to be plenty of time to read this during the week's train and plane rides.
My KLM flight left on time at 4:05. It was the kind of long, wide passenger jet that does transatlantic flights, and like almost always my seat was right in the middle.
After all the back-and-forth crossings of the Atlantic I've done, I've found ways of minimizing jet lag. Usually it involves meal timings, but when I'm going east over the ocean and the flight is leaving in the afternoon, the best I can do is eat normally and then try to put myself to sleep immediately afterward. I'd already had my last coffee of the day while hanging around the airport, and was abstaining from caffeine for the rest of the truncated day. A couple hours or so into the flight, after I'd gotten hooked on playing Angry Birds on the entertainment system, dinner was served. After dinner I had a glass of red wine and a couple shots of whiskey, hoping this would sufficiently knock me out.
Yes, yes, I know alcohol may knock you out but also makes your sleep restless; but in the early evening when I'm used to being awake it's the only self-induced sleep I can manage. I'd followed this same plan about three years earlier on a similarly-timed flight from Atlanta to Stuttgart and it worked well enough then. This time, sleep was, indeed, rather restless. As the plane was flying over the ocean where it was night, I'd fall asleep for just a little while, maybe an hour, then wake up again. I'd make myself fall asleep again, only to wake up again after barely an hour. How many times I went through this cycle, I don't know, and at least once I tried wearing my brain out by making myself play more Angry Birds. Next time I'll take an Ambien or something.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022 - Amsterdam
I didn't get enough sleep that night. But still, all those hours falling in and out of sleep, again and again, were somehow enough to convince my brain that one day was over and another had begun. The morning sunlight starting to enter the plane's windows helped with that. Breakfast was served, and I definitely felt like I was eating for the first time that day, so it seemed that I'd avoided the jet lag.
(So it seemed. Every day that week I would find myself getting quite drowsy and sometimes dozing off around three or four in the afternoon. Other than that, though, my sleep/wake cycle was perfectly normal.)
The plane touched down at Amsterdam-Schiphol airport at 10:15 in the morning, seven hours ahead of Austin, so that flight had lasted 11 hours and 10 minutes. After stepping off the plane, I of course had to take a long walk from the gate to passport control to get my passport stamped. This took even longer than it should have because I had a hard time finding the right way out; I spent too many minutes standing in a mile-long line that barely moved, until I found out that line was only for people catching connecting flights. Eventually I finally found the right way out, claimed my luggage, and stepped outside.
I bought a day pass for Amsterdam's transit system, planning to take a bus into the city, but staring perplexed at the maps outside and looking at all the route numbers on the bus stops, I couldn't for the life of me figure out which stop I should be waiting at to get into the middle of Amsterdam, so I just gave up on this and took a taxi. Pretty soon I was looking at this scene.
Walking around here I was really amazed by something, the fact that less than a day earlier I'd been walking up and down South Congress in Austin, and now only one flight later here I was in Amsterdam looking at this. Also I found it strange that I was impressed by this, because of how many times I'd been over the Atlantic each direction. It finally hit me that all those other journeys had involved layovers, either on one or both sides of the ocean, in which I didn't leave the layover airport. Sure, this trip had a long layover in Austin, but I actually left the airport and went into the city. This was the first, and right now the only time, that I visited one city for any amount of time, hopped a single flight to another continent, and then stepped right out into that city without catching any connections.
My train wasn't leaving until 1:34 in the afternoon, and I needed some coffee, so I stopped at a place near the Centraal train station called Café Karpershoek. They also had Belgian beer on tap, too. Usually I'm not going to drink alcohol in the morning, but I'm on vacation now! So after the coffee I had a glass of Affligem Blonde.
Not far from the café I found a place to get lunch: Maoz Vegan. This seems to be a local or regional chain of Mediterranean-inspired vegan fast-food restaurants. I had a falafel pita. It was tasty and I'd go back to a Maoz location if I ever saw one again.
It's so easy to get lost in the center of Amsterdam, with all these narrow streets and alleys crisscrossing each other. At one place I stopped for another coffee, because I have to have two every morning. Finally, I had to stop at a Henri Willig cheese shop. If you weren't already aware, Dutch cheese is some of the best cheese you'll ever find. It's definitely the best I've ever had. Back when I lived in Germany, I took every chance to buy a couple blocks whenever I could.
At Henri Willig, there were more varieties of cheese than I could count, and samples of most of them you could pick up and eat with toothpicks. After tasting many samples, I finally decided on two cheese blocks, one which had asparagus in it, and another which was even better, pesto cheese. That last one wasn't just full of flecks of pesto, the whole cheese was itself a dark green color. Both of these cheeses lasted me months at home.
With time steadily ticking away, I was thankfully able to find my way out of that maze of narrow streets and back to Centraal station. I was about to start a six-hour journey to Stuttgart on three trains, and the first would be from Amsterdam to Arnhem.
Austin and Amsterdam are both great cities, and if you live in or near one of the two, and can afford to do this (reward points help a lot!), you really should consider taking one of these direct flights to visit the other for a few days.
Stuttgart/Munich Trip:
