Mike and I have now been in Amsterdam for Robodock for three days. Getting here was an adventure in itself. The thing with going to an arts festival as an artist is that you need to haul all sorts of stuff there with you. We set off for the airport with our rolly-carry-ons each, plus our “personal item,” i.e. shoulder bags with computers and everything else possible stuffed in them. In addition we had four items of checked luggage weighing, in ascending order, 40 lbs, 50 lbs, 52 lbs (which the check-in lady fortunately didn’t notice, the limit being 50), ad 65 lbs. Yeah, not including our four carry-ons, we were traveling with 207 lbs of luggage.

We somehow failed to think about the 1 hour check-in requirement for international flights, probably because we were supposed to fly to San Francisco for a connecting flight and because our flight left at 8:30am. We missed check-in by minutes, and had to spend quite a while trying to finagle another flight. Finally they managed to book us on a direct flight from Seattle, and didn’t charge us for it!

We arrived in Amsterdam shortly before 8am. As I went to go get a SIM card for the phone, the Lone Conspirator went to meet some friends who were arriving at 8:20. Trying to do the SIM card was a disaster, which I won’t go into other than that it ended in both of my credit cards being locked because why on earth would I be in Amsterdam?

Everyone else was hauling lots of heavy luggage too, but we managed to land a large van cab rather than the original plan to take the train to the ferry to Robodock.

We arrived at Robodock, which is at NDSM, an artists squat in an industrial area in the northern part of Amsterdam, hauled the luggage to the camp and then pretty much got to work.

We worked all day, and then got beers and went to bed around 11. I’m not sure how long I was awake, but after 4 hours of sleep before going to the airport, it was very tiring.

And that’s basically what we’ve been doing every day: working. Building tracks for the power tool races, building racers, running around Amsterdam scouting for supplies. I am sore from carrying heavy stuff, and tired as hell, but I’m having a great time. This place is insane, and I will write about that more later, as well as the festival itself once it starts tomorrow evening.