Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS) - Day and Night

https://www.schiphol.nl/en/

I documented my hatred of Frankfurt pretty thoroughly the last time I went to Europe:

http://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-i-hate-frankfurt-airport.html

At the time I had mentioned wanting to go through Amsterdam, but it had been too expensive. This time it worked out; we passed through Amsterdam on our way both to and from Italy. I knew it was still a big airport, and could still be terrible, but I had to hope.

I ended up having two fairly different experiences, for different reasons.

We were not supposed to go through Amsterdam on the way there, but flood control measures caused our original connection through JFK to be delayed two hours, which made the connection impossible.We were rerouted, along with many others.

Schiphol is huge, and it was full of people, many of whom had been rerouted. We ended up next to two people out of a group of six who all ended up connecting through different airports. We still got to our final destination and at the originally scheduled time, plus no luggage was lost, so things could have been much worse. It nonetheless made the airport very crowded and chaotic.

I was worried about making our connection, and my mother's knees were really hurting. I did not think I could get her to the plane quickly enough on my own. I had not scheduled a wheelchair, but I started to wish I had. I thought I should at least ask.

There was a man answering questions. I asked him and he directed me to the information booth, and then a woman there directed me to the office where they handled those services. They did not have anyone free since I had not prearranged the service, but they could loan me a wheelchair.

This was still pretty stressful. I had to go to three different places and drag my hurting mother with me, because I was sure that if I tried to have her wait somewhere with me I would never see her again. However, each person gave me an answer that took me in the right direction, and getting the wheelchair was resolved pretty quickly. This already makes them better than Frankfurt. I sat my mother in the wheelchair and started to book it.

Here is another way that Schiphol was superior to Frankfurt: while the lines were very long, they had someone at the start of the line asking people for their flight times and sending people along in the order that made everyone most likely to catch their flight. He was asking about 9:45 flight times when I got there, and we were 9:35, so that felt like a bad sign. However he moved us ahead, and let us go to the head (with the help of another employee) because of the wheelchair.

Although Mom was truly hurting (the multiple hours spent in the plane did not help), I did have some hopes that the wheelchair could get us through faster, and it did. I am grateful for that. I am also grateful that in Amsterdam you do not keep changing floor levels, because constantly having to find elevators and wait for them would have killed a lot of the wheelchair's advantage. As it was, I arrived very tired and sweaty, and we probably still would have missed the plane if the other changes hadn't made it take off about fifteen minutes late, but by the skin of our teeth, we made it. I had to consider them a superior airport.

Then I spent the night there.

The outbound trip had dangerously short layovers, but on the return trip the layovers were quite long, including one from 9 PM to 9 AM in Amsterdam. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have twelve hours to explore Amsterdam, but most of what I am interested in is closed at night.

I had looked into options for sleeping at the airport. There were two hotels actually in the airport and several nearby, but I just couldn't decide what was best. That our flight details had changed so much may have made me more hesitant to commit. I decided to figure it out when we got there, but this was a bad idea.

I had no idea how much the airport shut downs at night. While there may be less flights coming in at night, they do still come. There was a mass of people getting off of our plane, so right after disembarking felt busy. As they all left the airport businesses were shutting down, including information desks.

I was speaking with some locals on the flight and they were talking about how the airport is so busy that instead of two hours you allow three, maybe four if you are international. So for a 9AM departure, I would not want to be later than 6AM, and maybe 5AM. The trains don't start running until 6:30 AM, and then the traffic gets really bad at 7. That did not mean it would be impossible to make it back if we left the airport for a hotel, but it made time more of a concern, on top of the financial concerns.

We'd already been on two flights. While they were short, we had already waited for six hours for Rome and two in Verona. My mother was getting disoriented, and my blood sugar suddenly plunged. I took a glucose tablet and ate a sandwich I had saved, but we needed food and rest, and we were unsuccessful in finding either.

Information attendants were gone for the night. There were self-service kiosks, but they would not give me information about the two hotels. I tried opening up my laptop, but the airport wifi stalled and I could not get the page to load. That left asking people who were still around the airport. That did not go as well. We wandered around and around, getting farther from where we needed to be, and passing by places we should have stayed that we could not find again.

(There was a lounge with something that looked like foam recliners. We should have just parked there for the night.)

This meant ending up on the wrong side of security, and thus having to go through it again. It may have meant going in circles, but I am not sure. We did eventually find one of the airport hotels and it was full. We ended up taking some chairs near a table and trying to put our feet up, maybe getting two hours of sleep. I had to be very stern with my mother, and we did not actually end up with any other food until about 5 AM the next morning. We survived, but it was a rough night, and the realization of how many hours we needed to get through made it worse.

Based on that, I didn't feel quite as good about Amsterdam. If you are not stuck there at night it is fine, and you can manage stuck there at night better than we did, but we also passed many people leaning on suitcases while we were wandering. For what it's worth, no one hassles you for sleeping out in the open. It does feel pretty vulnerable.

What I wish I had done now was booked one of the airport hotels in advance and booked a wheelchair, not just to make things easier for my mother but to have someone who knew where things were to get us there.

For a separate visit to Amsterdam in the future, well, okay, the airport may get busy, but I would probably be staying at a hotel then. The hotel staff would almost certainly be able to recommend the best way to get to the airport and when to leave for my departing flight, so that's how I would handle that.

Still better than Frankfurt.

I wish I had pictures of the crowds on that first morning, and the vast emptiness of that night, but in stressful situations you don't necessarily think of stopping to take photos, especially when you are pushing a wheelchair at a not quite run. So here is the one photo I did take, after we had breakfasted and found our gate and learned there was going to be one more slight delay: a giant Miffy with Mickey:

Traveling with special needs - long flights

There were a few things that ended up being flight issues. I don't know that I have great answers for them, but I can tell you what we ran into.

As a diabetic who currently has all injectables in vials, not pens, I kind of hate the liquids rule. Ideally I would have the vials in a padded box of some kind that would protect them, but I need them in a plastic bag. It's true that the vials are pretty tough, but I have had one break once, and you never forget it. I keep a pair of socks in my purse, and once through security I roll the bag up in them.

If you are going to be injecting on the plane, you need to think about cleaning and disposal. I use individually packaged alcohol wipes for the one. My inelegant solution for the other is a plastic bag and saving the tip from the needle to put back on it. Most airline restrooms have sharps disposal now, so you are only keeping it until the end of the flight.

On the plus side, with international flights they are bringing you food and beverages on a regular basis, so you are unlikely to get dehydrated or end up with low blood sugar without having a remedy. You should still never count on that. I made sure to stock up on glucose tablets before we left, and it ended up being really important when we hit Amsterdam on the way back. I'll write more about that next week.

I had to keep track of medications for both my mother and myself. With the time changes that involves deciding how to split them up. There is no exact perfect way, but I look at getting us onto the local schedule. For the first flight we were leaving Monday morning and arriving Tuesday afternoon, without long layovers. I gave her the Monday evening medications about three hours after the equivalent of the dinner they served us. We had an airport transfer and started a new flight around 10 AM in the time zone we were going to be in, so I gave her the Tuesday morning pills after boarding. Possibly an hour or two earlier would have been better, but we were rushing to make our flight then. You do the best you can.

It would be very helpful if I could have kept my mother's pills in her pill organizer, but again, that is not something security likes. So if in the process of fishing through four bottles for five pills, one tiny one gets dropped and can never be found again, well, that could have been much worse.

There were four main issues to traveling with a dementia patient.

One was Mom's inability to leave her purse alone. It is supposed to be stowed under the seat, and I kept putting it there and she kept pulling it back out. Dementia patients may not be able to identify that it is their memories that are missing, but there is still a sense of loss, which can lead to obsessing over possessions. I eventually gave up, and the flight attendant only mentioned it when we were getting ready to land, at which point Mom did leave it there, probably because the words of someone in authority matter more than me.

I touched on the bathroom issue in an earlier post. On eight and ten hour flights, you can't be expected to hold it the entire time, and it's good to get up and move around some. It stressed her out a lot to think about getting up, but you can tell when there is more anxiety about needing to go, and then you need to be firm. I timed my bathroom visits to go with hers. I thought that made sense in terms of less getting up, and not leaving her alone in the row, but when I got out the first time she had wandered to the back of the plane and I know she did not know where she was. That was frightening. I was more firm on subsequent visits about telling her to wait right there, but there are no guarantees. I had told her to wait the first time too. That's where I think tag teaming with another person could be good.

Having a partner could also be helpful for the reminders, because she did forget where we were and where we were going at times, and what we had done with the luggage (more of that obsessing). One of our seatmates could tell, and he very kindly started making conversation with my mother, which could have been a good rest only I was drawn into the conversation too. I came home with a deep tiredness, but that was not the biggest problem.


The biggest problem was her tiredness. There is sleep deprivation, and the more tired she became, she not only became more disoriented but more hostile about it. One the way there we were met at the airport by a cousin and while we did make one visit first, I could then say that she needed to rest, and we went to the hotel. Even after just an hour or two of lying down she was somewhat better.

The return was much worse. Not only did it end up being longer, but then there was a much worse customs process, and no one to meet us. We used MAX for transportation to and from the airport on our California trip and it was fine, so that was still my plan. I quickly realized that I needed something faster and simpler, but it was midday so that added an expense. I probably could have done better with prearranging something. I have never used Lyft or Uber, but this probably would have been the time.

Traveling with special needs - TSA Pre✓®

I am going to try tackling the "traveling with special needs" topic in these next posts. One reason for my reluctance last week is that I am not sure that I have anything helpful to say. I know what problems came up, but I am not sure that I have any solutions. We largely just endured.

One thing happened that I still don't understand; somehow we ended up as TSA PreCheck:

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs/global-entry/tsa-precheck

I know you can pay for this. While I object on the grounds that the last thing we need is more cash-based inequality, I can totally see why you might decide that the shorter line and less invasive security check is worth the investment. Regardless, as my account is running dry, I would not have been able to and did not pay for it.

The only possible explanation I can give for how we got it is that maybe because we had just been through the system at the end of January, somehow that was a recent enough check that we could do the short process.

The first time-saver was that the line was much shorter, with fewer people in it. Fatigue ended up being a big part of our problems, so any expedition is good.

We also did not have to remove shoes and things, and there were not as many things that we needed to take out specially out of our carry on items.

Also, we did not have to go through the full body scanner, just a regular metal detector.

This worked well for me. The body scanner always seems to show something by my right knee. My only guess is that when that piece of rebar recoiled and slashed me, leaving me susceptible to an opportunistic infection that hits me any time my immune system gets too stressed, it may also have left a tiny scrap of metal in my body that migrated up a few inches and then got stuck. Or maybe it's a fat thing; I don't know.

For my mother, titanium joint replacements still set off the metal detector, subjecting her to the increasingly intimate pat-down.

I had been looking up different tips for traveling with dementia patients, and they all said to keep the person in front of you, with that as a better vantage point for guiding them and hearing the instructions they are getting.

That seems to be mainly true, but it is still not everything you would hope for. Part of me has come away thinking that really you need two people so you can tag team. One in front, one in back. Never one person in the bathroom while you have to hope your charge will not move or have anyone ask them any confusing questions as they stand outside the bathroom.

Of course, that would involve one more airline ticket, a bigger hotel room, more spending on food, more room in cars, more time off work... there are a lot of things that make it prohibitive.

I guess it is still more affordable than my other idea: traveling by private jet.

AC Hotel Vicenza by Marriott

I just got back from a week in Italy with my mother. I had thought this week would be traveling with special needs, but I am not ready for that one yet. I may do it next week, and then get to the beautiful and wonderful places and eateries, or I may do them first. It does make sense to get the bad review out of the way.

There were several things that were frustrating. I chose the hotel partly because I read that it had a laundry room. This was a lie. It has laundry service, but that is not the same thing. It is also not located near a laundromat, which could also have been fine.


I wanted to like them. They were conveniently located for some things, and one of my cousins had even worked for them for a short stint, but they disappointed me every time I gave them a chance.The service in the restaurant was terrible, in that it was impossible to get service. There was always something: "We're closed." "We're out of that." "Could you go to the bar instead?" Being closed is at least valid, though having hours posted visibly could have avoided that.

But where I really want to spend some time is on the bathroom, because there are some interesting points there, and I think we can have some fun with it.

On a side note, it's the first place I have ever stayed with a bidet. I didn't use it, but I did check it out. I have heard of people getting sprayed in the face, but in this case the water just flows down out of the faucet, like a normal tap. If it is for "washing your backside" (as Crocodile Dundee deduced), the spray seems like it would work better. I have heard you can use it for washing other things, but if it is ever used for backsides, I don't want to put anything else into it. I may be too American, but it doesn't seem practical.

And practicality is really the key.

The bathroom was sleek and modern and lovely. Look at that clear counter. You can also catch a glimpse of the half shower door.

One of the cute ideas was soap in the shape of a golf ball, with a box that acts as the soap dish.

It does not stay good looking, getting worse with each use. That is a good summary of the issues with the bathroom.

That sleek counter develops water spots and streaks with each use. Yes, it cleans, but it spends most of its time looking dirty in a way that marble and its imitators don't.

The half door lets a lot of water out. That is a little worse because the adjustable shower head is hard to get into a good spot and have it stay there, but that particular problem is a little more common.

The towel rack hanging at the back of the shower is not as perilous as it looks - the towel stayed dry. However, what may not be obvious from the photo is that the tub is really high. There was a sign to hang the towel if you did not need it replaced to conserve water. I admire that, but if you got out of the tub to get dry (which is the only way to get all the way dry) you were not able to reach the rack to hang the towel back up.

With that high tub, there was a rail in the tub, but it was on the far side. If you were lying it the tub it was probably helpful for getting up, but for getting in and out of the tub, there were no good options for bracing.

I know that some of the issues were due to a lack of space and attempts to maximize it. That comes up a lot with hotels. A lot of it was still putting form over function.

I read once that "design" is merely a way of solving problems. That is probably an oversimplification, but it feels reasonable to say that a design that creates problems was done badly.

That applies in this case.

Would not stay again.

http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/vicvi-ac-hotels-by-marriott-vicenza/