Rain, and the Bookings That Follow It

It is not that rain makes people book. It is that rain removes the alternatives, and what is left is a room, a long evening and a decision that was going to be made anyway, arrived at three hours earlier than it otherwise would have been.

What a wet afternoon does to a trip

Two things at once, in opposite directions. Outdoors it empties the city out: the canals are genuinely pleasant in light rain, the pavements widen because half the people are gone, and a walk along the water becomes the calmest thing available. Indoors it does the reverse, because everybody has moved inside simultaneously and every room with a roof is fuller than it was an hour ago.

For a visitor already worn down by crowds, that combination is worth understanding. A wet morning is a good time to walk and a poor time to queue for anything. The instinct runs the other way and the instinct is wrong.

The evening after

By five or six, a wet day has usually produced a guest who is damp, cold and has revised his plans twice. The evening he had loosely imagined, which involved going out somewhere, has quietly stopped being appealing, and he is sitting in a room with wet shoes trying to decide whether to force it.

Those messages read differently from the third-evening ones. They are less about exhaustion and more about the day having deflated. Shorter, a bit resigned, often asking for something the same evening rather than planning ahead.

Cold is the part that matters

A guest who has been rained on is colder than he thinks and stays colder for longer than he expects, and that has a direct bearing on the hour he is about to book. A body that is cold does not stop bracing, and a slow session spends its first stretch waiting for exactly that to let go.

So the practical advice on a wet evening is blunter than usual. Turn the heating up as soon as the booking is confirmed rather than when she arrives; forty to sixty minutes is roughly what a radiator needs and it is also the arrival window. Have a hot shower during the wait, which does more than anything else. Close the window regardless of how stuffy the room feels.

Wet weather and the arrival window

Rain does not change the forty to sixty minutes across central Amsterdam, but it does push arrivals towards the longer end of it, for the ordinary reason that everything in this city moves a little slower in the wet. A guest who has planned an evening around an exact minute should not, and never should, though it is on a wet night that the difference is most noticeable.

Drying things, which sounds trivial

It is not entirely. A room with wet coats and shoes in it is colder and smells of wet coats and shoes, which is a poor environment for the next two hours. Hang things in the bathroom with the door shut rather than over a radiator in the room, and the room stays warm and dry while the coat gets on with it.

The argument for booking on the wet day rather than the next one

Guests often postpone, on the theory that tomorrow will be nicer and the evening better spent. Occasionally that is right. More often the nice day gets filled with the things the wet day displaced, and the evening after a full day is a worse candidate than the evening after a washed-out one. The empty evening is the one to use, and rain is what produces it.

The other weather that does this

Wind, which visitors underestimate, and cold with it. A flat city with water running through it channels wind along the canals in a way that makes a nine degree afternoon feel considerably worse than the number suggests, and the effect on a trip is the same as rain without the visual drama to explain it. Guests come in from a windy afternoon flattened and slightly baffled about why.

Heat is the opposite case and produces its own cluster. A hot week fills every shaded space and every terrace, the evening stays bright until late, and the guest who has been in crowds all day wants the room dark rather than warm. That is the one evening where the air conditioning is worth running, set to stay on rather than cycle, since a unit that clicks in and out every few minutes is the loudest object in a quiet room.