I had to go back and forth to Schiphol Airport this week for a training at a client of ours. The previous time I visited this client, the location was very close to Schiphol Central. There’s a very frequent train service between Utrecht Central and Schiphol Central that only take 30 minutes.
There’s a big difference however between being at Schiphol Central and being at Schiphol Rijk. The two are separated by an infrequent and at times lengthy (30 minute) bus service. That’s why I decided to take the car to this week. After day one, I immediately knew why I had decided not to take my car to Amsterdam anymore in the past four months. The first day, getting there took me an hour. Which is not that bad. The second day (yesterday), took my 90 minutes. Today again took me 90 minutes to get to Schiphol Rijk because of an accident on the highway A2 towards Amsterdam. I gave Kees a lift today (his wife needed the car) and he showed me his usual route, which avoids the highways all together. It only took about 45 minutes to get to his place and another 10 minutes to get mine. That means I saved about 30 minutes. I’m going to try that one out tomorrow morning as well.
One thing is certain, I’d rather take a plane twice a week than commute back-n-forth to work 5 days a week (at least, that is, if it’s by car and in the direction of Amsterdam).
In the meantime, I did learn a bunch of Italian though. I recently received my copy of Italian with Michel Thomas, an excellent way of learning Italian (or any language for that matter, like Spanish) while driving. There are a lot of other courses (like Pimsleur), but of all of those, I like Michel Thomas’ courses the best.
