We went to Amsterdam for a long weekend built around a youth field hockey tour. The matches were scattered around the city and beyond, which meant this was never going to be a conventional Amsterdam weekend.
Three Marriott Free Night Certificates approaching expiry added another constraint. We ended up splitting three nights between two hotels, using the free Friday for Moco Museum and discovering an unexpected collection of contemporary art almost underneath our second hotel. These are the five articles that came out of the weekend.
Planning the Weekend
The hotel plan started with three 35,000-point Marriott certificates approaching expiry. At first, using one each night seemed obvious. Once I looked at the hockey tour schedule, the three nights were no longer interchangeable.
The First Night
Thursday needed a hotel that made arrival from London and an evening match in Abcoude straightforward. That gave citizenM Amsterdam Amstel one very specific job.
A Free Friday
Friday was the one day without a match. With a few hours free and Museumplein within easy reach of citizenM, we headed to Moco Museum without building the whole day around it.
The Next Two Nights
On Friday we moved south to Element Amsterdam. It had looked like a compromise when I booked it, but Amsterdam Zuid turned out to be particularly useful for a weekend spent traveling to hockey grounds in different parts of the region.
Underneath the Hotel
Element sits inside the Gelderlandplein shopping center. What looked like a practical collection of shops and restaurants turned out to contain something unexpected.
That was the Amsterdam weekend: three nights, two hotels, three expiring certificates and a hockey tour that repeatedly sent us somewhere other than central Amsterdam. These five articles are what came out of it.
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