The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

This hotel makes good use of being on the corner of the Amstel river and a canal.

Evan though I had a good umbrella, my feet and legs from the thigh down were drenched. This was my evening walk to the tram and it only took about 5 minutes of rain like this to get squishy feet.

This is a newly refurbished road in front of a newly refurbished set of buildings.

The leaves are starting to fall.

A sunny day in Amsterdam leads to dog walks and grocery shopping via bicycle. My bike’s pannier is from Albert Heijn, the big grocery chain in the area, and it has a print of a stroopwafel on the side.

You may have noticed I like sharing short stories of my adventures. I probably get that from my dad who has written a few short stories about his life growing up in North Dakota. With those in mind, there is a series of videos called HUMAN. Watch them on YouTube, I suggest starting with Volume 1, then 2, and finally 3. The short stories are by people from all around the world, and they include people explaining their experiences on love, killing, and everything in between. It’s best to turn on Closed Captioning (the little CC icon on the bottom right of the video player) so you can see where the person is from.

I think you can rent old trams, because we’ve seen a double car version with what looked like a wedding reception happening on it. They don’t stop to pick up passengers either.

Last weekend we went for a nice bike ride with a friend along the Amstel river. It’s flat the entire way and doesn’t take long to get into farmland.

Now that our episode of House Hunters International has aired, we can share some photos from our experience. If you missed it, you can watch “A Doggie Dilemma in Amsterdam” on HGTV or on YouTube.

A few interesting things to know:

1. We really did get the dogs passports at the vet during the filming.
2. I don’t usually wear my shirt sort of unbuttoned, but I needed to for the microphone to work with my high-collared shirt.
3. The YouTube version cuts off before one of our favorite scenes, where I (for some reason) tell Piper that she’s fluffy. Watch it on HGTV (online or find it on-demand)
4. Our friends at the end are Cathy, who can speak some Dutch since she lives here, and Abby who flew in from New York to help watch the dogs while filming.
5. Xaviera really is a real estate agent in Amsterdam, not an actor.
6. The filming in Amsterdam took 4 days, but we had to pay attention to our wardrobe and wear the same things for the house scenes so it looked like we saw them all on the same day.
7. We had 1 camera man, 1 sound guy, 1 director, and 1 “runner” who would deal with whatever city stuff needed to be done, drive the crew around, and get them snacks and lunch.
8. We’re glad we don’t work in television; there’s too much standing around!
9. There’s much more to tell, but probably best left to tell in person.