When I rebooked this trip for the final time, I could not get Turkish Airlines award flights to show up in LifeMiles so that left me not only with a huge balance of LifeMiles, but also no way home from Kenya. In the end, I found KLM award flights with a long layover in Amsterdam. My wife and I decided it would be nice to break up the trip with a few hours in the city, including taking our kids to the Anne Frank House.

After we disembarked our flight from Nairobi, we quickly got through immigration. The officer asked how long we were staying and I answered “about seven hours – we don’t just want to sit at the airport.” He seemed to find that amusing and we were through into the Netherlands.

We found the baggage storage area downstairs and stowed our backpacks for six Euros for the day. Last time I did this in 2017, there were lockers, but now you have to send your bag through an x-ray into the storage area and get a ticket from the attendant.

Since we had plenty of time and it was morning rush hour, we decided that the train (about 20 Euros for the four of us) was a better idea than Uber (pricing at about 35 Euros). We went back upstairs and into the airport train station where I bought tickets from the machine and we found our track for the train into Centraal Station. We ended up in First Class by mistake, but nobody came along to check our tickets. It took about 20 minutes to get to Centraal.

It was still dark and drizzling when we exited the station. I decided that we would walk in a more circuitous route to the Anne Frank House to kill some time and show the kids some more of the city. Despite the gloomy weather, they enjoyed seeing a very different place than Kenya.

We found a nice-looking coffee bar called Il Momento on the way and stopped in for some coffee. We ended up getting to the museum just before 9am, but the crowds were light and they let us in early.

Everyone took their time going through the museum. It’s really a must-see if you make it Amsterdam. The original hiding place has been well-preserved. No pictures are allowed inside.

When we were finished going through all the exhibits, it was around 10:15am. I had researched pancake restaurants and found a well-regarded one nearby called The Pancake Bakery. We walked down the canal the short distance to the restaurant. Everyone ordered something different and enjoyed it. I had the Dutch pancake with cinnamon ice cream, stroopwaffels and chocolate chips.

After our brunch, the weather had cleared and we walked all the way across town to the flower market and then around some other neighborhoods. In the end, we walked about seven miles total in Amsterdam.

We caught another train back to the airport around 12:15pm and retrieved our bags back from the storage area.

We already had our KLM boarding passes from check-in at Nairobi and our bags were checked through, so we headed straight to security. There was no wait at priority security and we walked to the KLM Crown Lounge 52 to wait for our flight.

Up Next: KLM Crown Lounge 52 AMS Review.

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