Not Just a New Adventure; It’s an Odyssey from Greenland to Egypt

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Day -1, 2025 European Odyssey

Saturday, June 28, 2025; Amsterdam, Netherlands

I pondered what to call this journey. Previous cruises came with a name — Grand World Voyage, Ultimate Mediterranean, Majestic Japan, Voyage of the Vikings.

This time I’m not embarking on a single cruise, but on 10 back-to-back cruises on the same ship, ranging from 13 days to 28 days each. All in all, it adds up to five months, or 154 days on Holland America’s Nieuw Statendam.

I’m calling this one an Odyssey.

Merriam-Webster calls an odyssey “any long, complicated journey, often a quest for a goal, and maybe a spiritual or psychological journey as well as an actual voyage.” I’m not sure about the psychological journey part, but odyssey seems to fit better than travels, jaunts, expeditions, passages or adventures.

I arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday morning, after not sleeping long on the overnight flight from Dallas. All day I craved a soft bed, but instead I booked a walking tour in the afternoon and forced myself to stay awake until 9 p.m. The strategy worked. By Thursday I pretty much adapted to the seven-hour time difference.

I am staying at The Posthoorn Amsterdam, a delightful B&B recommended by Joyce, a cruise buddy since 2011 and a native of the Netherlands. The owners live on the top floors of this 1620-ish canal house and rent out three rooms on the lower levels.

My windows look out over the Prinsengracht, the outermost of the three main canals circling the city center. Beautiful houseboats line the narrow canal, and it’s only a short walk to the central train station, the Anne Frank house or the Rijksmuseum, home of Vermeers and Rembrants.

I haven’t packed my visit with “must-dos,” but did made time for a Captain Jack canal boat ride and a guided tour of the Rijksmuseum. The tour concentrated on 17th Century Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals. (On my only previous visit to Amsterdam, I toured the Van Gogh Museum and wandered through tulips and other spring flowers at Keukenhof.)

Today I took the train about an hour southeast to ‘s-Hertogenbosch (say that three times fast) to visit dear family friends. I wrote in 2019 and again in 2023 about our mothers who wrote a craft book together 35 years ago. Darja, their oldest daughter, organized our lunch in a castle with her parents. Mom and Dad would be so pleased that we continue to visit back and forth.

Sunday morning an Uber will take me to Rotterdam (way too much luggage to wrestle onto the train), where I will board the Nieuw Statendam. It’s one of Holland America’s largest cruise liners, but with about 2,500 passengers, it is small in comparison with the giants of some brands. I normally sail on smaller ships that are assigned the longest cruises. But I was entranced by the summer and fall itinerary of the Nieuw Statendam. While it will repeat some ports, this year it never repeats a cruise. We will start in Northern Europe, including Iceland and Greenland. By early September we will sail to the Mediterranean Sea before crossing the Atlantic Ocean for Florida at the end of November.

I’ll close with maps of the 10 cruises to give you a taste of what is to come.

1: June 29, 2025
2: July 27, 2025
3. Aug. 10, 2025
4: Aug. 24, 2025
5: Sept. 7, 2025
6: Sept. 20, 2025
7: Oct. 4, 2025
8: Oct. 18, 2025
9: Nov. 1, 2025
10: Nov. 15, 2025