The Netherlands

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    Meet Your Hosts

    ByKara Monroe

    Spoiler Alert: There are LOTS of tulips featured on this trip. Hi all. It’s time to kick off another set of blog posts for an adventure - this time it’s two weeks through Europe - including London, The Netherlands, and Belgium with a combination of touring on our own and our first ever river cruise and Adventures by Disney trip! I thought I’d take a moment to refresh our “Meet Your Hosts” post because, well a lot has changed. We are Kara and Gayle. Gayle also happens to be a travel agent…

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    Origin Story

    ByGayle Hartleroad

    Gayle: Let’s take the “Way Back Machine” to… 2017? This is the first time I remember Kara ever mentioning interest in a river cruise. Her rationale was to see “inner Europe”, where an ocean cruise couldn’t take us. In researching, I discovered most river cruisers are in their 60s+ and many are retired. Well, we definitely weren’t that! So the trip we were discussing back then ended up being our first Europe Disney Cruise, which was to the Med . Over time we researched a number of different…

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    Day 8 - Let The Adventure Begin

    ByKara Monroe

    On board the AmaLucia Hi everyone. Kara starting off again today. We had, as our British friends would say, a good lay-in this morning and allowed ourselves to sleep in until about 8:30am this morning. The only thing on our agenda today was to check out of the hotel, have a nice brunch or lunch, and head to the ship. More on how that could have gone differently a bit later. Breakfast We showered, dressed, and finished packing and took our bags down to the bell stand by 11am. I checked us out…

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    Day 9 - It’s Tulip (Picking) Time

    ByKara Monroe

    Besties in a field of tulips Hi all. Kara starting out again today. Our river cruise is starting out with what we’ve learned is an unusual occurrence! We have two mornings in a row that are sailing mornings. As such, we had a nice leisurely morning. Wind turbines like those we see in Indiana are even in the water here in the Netherlands. We learned that the tops of them rotate to catch the wind. I woke up at 6am and went down to the coffee machine in the lounge to get my first cup - a mocha….

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    Day 10 - Go With The Flow

    ByKara Monroe

    Disney had no idea how much meaning “Going with the flow” would take on today! ADVENTURE!!! Hi all. Kara again. Let’s just say that the theme of today’s post is going to be adventure all the way through. Remember that 82 page travel guide I made for us. We threw it out the window today! Before I start today, let’s rewind back to Sunday night after dinner. We met with Adventure Guide Michaela to go over the plan for the week. We learned then we were going to be docking in Bruinisse rather than…

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    Day 14 - Keukenhof Gardens

    ByKara Monroe

    Hi friends. This is future Kara writing to you from July 2025 - exactly three months to the day from when we returned from this trip. Posting these blog posts has been a labor of love that has taken longer than either of us would like. And, now, as we have reached the end of the trip, we’ve realized that we didn’t write anything for this day or our trip home (which thankfully was mostly non-eventful with just the usual horrific wait to get through customs in Chicago and catching the last…