I'm off to Amsterdam again, for still more adventures during my first autumn visit...thus the title.

To get us ready for Amsterdam, here's a pic of one of SF's two drawbridges, which somehow lacks the, ummm, delicacy of Amsterdam's. Take another look at those humongous counterweights:

My damn legs have failed again, but luckily this summer the new, improved, kinder, gentler, and eminently more sensible Dutch Transportation Minister lifted the ban on the Segway, so I'm taking mine again to permit me to get around better.

Which is just as well because I now have a new Amsterdam correspondent who this spring started a Dutch Cooking blog (in English, yet) with interesting recipes and recommendations for food shops and restaurants. I'm dying to visit all of 'em I don't already know, and since many of her favorite places are in her own part of town rather than Rina's, they would be very tedious for me to get to without the Segway.

The hitch is that although KLM is happy to fly the Segway over for me as a handicap assistance device, like all the other airlines they will not ship the new lithium-ion batteries, so I'm having new cells installed in my old NiMH batteries. To make life more entertaining, there was a production delay at the company, and I'm sweating their arrival in time for my departure.

Meanwhile, I'm frantically trying to complete my preparations. You know, stuff like getting my new notebook PC ready for its maiden voyage: I spent yesterday trying to trick my Dutch dictionary into running on it, a day of hacking and cursing that ended in failure after I had finally painfully translated pages of technical Dutch off the damn website and downloaded the file that would permit the thing to run under the Vista operating system, only to discover once past that hurdle that it no longer liked the serial number I had used on my previous computer. Grrrrr. The master plan now is to see if I can get Rina's delightful young engineering student neighbor Alexander to help me read all those Dutch instructions and figure out what I'm doing wrong.

And hey, I'm trying, but is it really fair for the instructions accompanying a Dutch-English/English-Dutch dictionary to be only in Dutch? I mean, if I could read Dutch well, I wouldn't need the dictionary, now would I?

Other preparatory excitement here includes passing the rules and riding test for my BART Disabled Segway rider badge, which I'll take with me to brandish in case I get any flak.

Rina and I are both slowing down, so there'll be a less frantic social schedule and I'll be cooking less. Gonna give 'em a break this year on the chile verde, so I won't have to lug tomatillos and Pasilla chiles, but I am taking a selection of chile powders for chile con carne as well as the Tierra foods mix that simplifies making mole poblano, which the Dutch just love.

And hey, the cornbread is also a favorite, so I'll bring a couple of pounds of cornmeal since I haven't been able to find the right grind over there.

And then for gifts: 12 oz. bottles of dark agave nectar, assorted El Rey chocolates, packages of Mexican saffron, green Tabasco sauce, decorated muffin papers, and bars of California Bay Laurel soap. For Rina's grandchildren, more American coins (state commemorative quarters and presidential commemorative dollars) and kids' books in English.

I'm going to do my best to write some of the tales while I'm there and get them posted, so do peck on NoeHill occasionally.