This summer, Ann Savage, along with several other members of the Austin College women's basketball team, will be globe-trotting with stops in Europe, as well as South America and Central America. Periodically this summer, Ann will be providing updates from her whirlwind travel itinerary.
This week saw a trip to Amsterdam, where Ann was joined by Bryce Frank, Mikayla Gascich, and Caitlyn Collins. The quartet came to Austin College as members of the same recruiting class, and are traveling the world heading into their senior year (though Savage has two years of basketball eligibility remaining). Berlin is up next on the agenda, while Savage and Gascich will be heading to Peru during the month of June, volunteering to work with children. Finally, members of the basketball team will be heading to Costa Rica for a team trip later this summer.
In case you missed it, here's PART ONE.
After leaving London, Ann and her teammates traveled to Amsterdam. Here's Ann's latest check-in...
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The four of us left our apartment in London at 4:00 a.m. on Sunday to catch our 7:00 a.m. flight to Amsterdam. When we arrived in Amsterdam we walked around to different shops and the tulip market on our way to our hostel. In the early evening we took a canal tour through the winding streets. Amsterdam is an easy city to navigate and we walked everywhere we needed to go.
On Monday, we went to a flea market and to an old train station that was turned into a food market. After lunch we made our way to the Anne Frank House. It was definitely something worth seeing and we found it to be informative and respectful of the tragedies that took place. The experience made it much more real for us.
Some food highlights were the Dutch pancakes, which were a crepe consistency. They had all different kinds of sweet and savory flavors. We tried the Mexican, French and Caprese pancakes. We also tried homemade stroopwaffles which are wafer-like cookies with caramel syrup in between. The macaroons were delicious and there were bakeries all over the city.
On Tuesday, we went to see the windmills outside of Amsterdam. It was nice to experience what life looks outside of the city and we all enjoyed the quaint little town where the windmills were. There were beautifully colored old-timey windmills with open green fields and a river as the back drop. In the afternoon, we saw the Van Gogh museum and enjoyed the temporary art exhibit the most, which highlighted Van Gogh's Japanese influences in his artwork.
The trip went off without a hitch, besides running through the airport scared we were going to miss our flight only to find out our flight had been delayed an hour. Amsterdam has more bicycles than people, so we had a couple of close calls dodging bikes in the city but were able to manage staying safe. A story that we laughed about, and hopefully Mikayla will laugh about one day too: as we were walking around the windmills, a bird pooped on her head. But we heard it was good luck, so hopefully that bodes well for the rest of the trip.
We all loved our time in Amsterdam and are excited to go back to London to sightsee and watch three more plays before we leave for Berlin on Sunday.