Sassafrass

Bilboburgler, all of your comments on this thread are so great and relevant. I wish every new traveler could/would read them all. I do love museums and churches, etc., certainly would encourage people to visit them, and often, I feel we have missed out on seeing a lot of things that people fit into carefully planned itineraries. OTHO, we have had so many experiences similar to yours. Poor planning on our part once left us stranded in a very out of the way, English village during a strike. As we meandered around, trying to decide how best to deal with our situation, an elderly gentleman stopped us and questioned our being there. He ended up taking us “home” with him for tea, home being a huge estate with acres of gardens. Honestly, it seems that every time our plans have gone off the rails a bit and we just relaxed in one place, we had some wonderful experience like that.

bilboburgler

Thank you
We once got lost in Damascus and a nice guy from Liverpool took us home for tea and showed us photos of him with Monty (UK crazy general) very surreal.

AlessandraZoe

ssbbaa77, you have received some good advice. Happy you seem to have heard the overall message. You said you were into art, history, nature, water and walking, and Amsterdam and its nearby connections easily provide all of that. Like you, we are into meeting people in cities, so we try to establish a favorite bar, bakery, restaurant etc and people have been great about giving us inside tips that way.

FYI, I have been to Amsterdam twice and I'd do it again. The second time we went, which was a two-week trip, we used Brussels as a second base, and I don't think you'll have time for that. You will have more than enough time for some daytrips from Amsterdam, though. We never used a tour on either Amsterdam trip because almost everything we wanted to see was not far from any train station. We used tram tickets, train tickets and our feet. You won't run out of things to see or do.
Sidenote: Our goal on that second trip was to explore the wide variety of Northern Renaissance painters, and it was more than fulfilled. We did day trips every day after we had exhausted each local city museums, going as far as Antwerp and Ghent.

I was able to score Anne Frank tix twice by being crafty, so get on that now. You might also check into special exhibits in various museums and make sure you have access. There was a retrospective Van Gogh at the second time we went, and luckily, I have preplanned enough that our party of six in the Amsterdam part of the trip all got entrance.
And while the Van Gogh and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are great, the Mauritshuis in Den Hague beat every museum we had seen on those two trips.
We combined our day in the Mauritshuis with a side stop to Delft, the site of Vermeer's very few but simply amazing landscapes. We have often said we would just like to have hung in Delft a bit longer because we liked it so much.

Happy planning--you have a lot of homework to do! Best of luck,
AZ

ssbbaa77

Did you need to get cash in advance when traveling to Amsterdam or do they take credit card everywhere?

Thanks much

AlessandraZoe

Good question.
We were last there a decade ago, and I assumed they had moved to more cashless society. So I looked it up. It seems they have but not totally.

According to several sources, the most popular form of payment in use is a debit card, and those on your smartphone would be accepted.
Google Wallet/Apple Pay widely accepted.
Credit cards are less popular, but of course hotels etc must accept them.
Cash is needed only at a few places--and remember, you always have the option of only choosing places that accept your credit /debit card. There's a catch with cash, anyway--ATMs are disappearing AND the places that need cash won't take large bills.

Hope others who have been there more recently can confirm the above.
AZ

Tulips

Amsterdam is mostly cashless, some places do not accept cash at all. Something like Applepay, or contactless credit card works. It's true that there are some places that take debit card only, or cards with a Maestro logo, notably Albert Heijn supermarkets. They have now started to accept CC, but apparently not in some of the smaller ones. Public transport works with a credit or debit card or apple/google pay. Just tap in and out.