Our last day in Europe, and we buried our sadness at leaving with more pancakes. Breakfast may have momentarily sated our stomachs but not our anxiety. It was a familiar refrain: too much to see and too little time to see it. But despite our usual inclinations, we opted for a different tact. We knew we’d soon be flying home and, more than that, staring down 24 hours of hell once we landed: getting all our belongings out of temporary storage, dropping them off in the residence of our new tenant, flying to San Francisco, moving into an Airbnb, and starting a new life. In other words, we knew that we had to save our strength.
The rest of the day was remarkably peaceful as a result. We sat for a long coffee near Sarphatipark, then shared a colorful cone of ice cream at Urban Cacao. There were lots of contenders for must-see museums of Amsterdam, but we staked our money on the Van Gogh Museum and were not disappointed. Hoping to go in the afternoon, we settled instead for evening tickets due to high demand, reminiscent of our failed attempt to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. We saw some of Van Gogh’s other work back in Paris, at the Musée d'Orsay, but it was fascinating to get the fuller picture in the country of his birth.
The museum detailed Van Gogh’s life and work, his relationship with his family, his fraught romances, his history of depression, and his middling career as an art dealer and a missionary before he settled into art of his own. Shocking to me was that his career as a painter only began in earnest when he was 30 and lasted for seven years until his death; he only became a master at his craft at age 36. The fact that Van Gogh has had such an outsized impact on the world nonetheless filled me with the stubborn hope that perhaps it truly is never too late—but also that life is painfully short. I was especially awed by how prolific Van Gogh was just before his death. He was able to produce 70 paintings in the last 67 days of his life. By contrast, it took me over sixteen months to write 25 500-word travel posts. But I guess there’s a price that comes with genius.
The “everything on a stick” restaurant from our guidebook that we’d hoped to go to for our last meal was nowhere to be found, so we decided on another Indonesian dinner, where we ordered a final rice table for two. Huddled under our rain jackets, we walked the rest of the way back to our room. The bridges crisscrossing the canals were lit up from below and streetlamps illuminated the path. There were neon awnings for late-night Halal food, coffeeshops, and an aptly-named bar: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
We met our host for the first time that evening to pay for our stay, a kind Dutch man with dreams of visiting San Francisco. “That’s where we’re moving tomorrow,” Courtney replied, of the city we would nary live in for seven months before returning to Seattle and which already feels like a dream. If he did suspect a lack of enthusiasm in our voice, he didn’t show it.
The next morning, we would board a 14-hour flight back home. We’d worry about where to wait for the shuttle bus and how we’d pay the fare, but none of it was an issue. In that moment, we focused on cleaning the room and packing up our things: the hiking boots we’d used in the Alps, the ticket stubs from the train to Blois, our swimsuits from the baths in Budapest and Vals. We posed for one final photo outside, the city’s lights pulsing at our backs. We were contented and grateful for the nearly four weeks we spent in Europe, on buses and trains, in restaurants and with crowds, not fully appreciating then just how much they would mean to us now.
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This is the final post in a 25-part series about a honeymoon trip to Europe. Read all the previous entries here.