Mini road trip in the Netherlands: Tulips, Edam, Giethoorn, Zaanse, Amsterdam
Now that we live in Lille, it’s easier for us to explore the northern countries. From Lille, we can take the train, but it’s excessively expensive and takes forever. JB and I decide to go for a Flixbus, even if it means leaving the day before and adding a hotel night, it’ll still be much cheaper than taking the train or the plane. We’re even surprised that JB has vacation time while he’s still on probation, but his company wanted everyone to take vacation before a certain date, so here we are, forced to “go on vacation”. A concept we no longer knew during those 8.5 years of freelancing around the world. So much so that JB completely forgot that Monday was a holiday, and we returned to Lille on Sunday instead of Monday.
After my trip to Amsterdam, Facebook suggested lots of places to visit in the Netherlands, I noted them down and take advantage of this second trip to visit those highlights.
Day 0
At 6 PM, JB finishes work. We have barely 15 minutes to throw what we’re missing into the suitcase. I cut some slices of salami to eat on the bus. We walk to the station. Big mistake! Torrential rain pours down on us. We’re perfectly dry from the knee up, but our shoes, socks, and part of our jeans are completely soaked. Fortunately, the bus is somewhat heated, and after a 4h20 bus ride, we arrive in The Hague somewhat dry. The reason we don’t go straight to Amsterdam is (1) the high cost of hotels in Amsterdam (2) the tulips are closer to The Hague than to Amsterdam.
Instead of dinner, we finish the few snacks we brought with us and then hit the sack. We’ll spend 2 nights in The Hague.
Day 1
We’re a bit unhappy with the hotel bed. Having equipped our apartment with bedding & bath linens from 5-star hotel suppliers (we have almost everything a Marriott room has), we start comparing our linens to the hotel’s in The Hague; we miss everything: our bedding, our 100% down & feather pillows, our soft bath towels, even our honeycomb-woven cotton bathrobes. We wake up with slightly stiff necks because the pillow height doesn’t suit us. I realize with horror that now, only 5-star hotels could match the comfort of our apartment. And for us, traveling now means a downgrade in comfort.
Today, we’re just going to tour the tulip fields. JB and I rent a small car from Hertz, and thankfully, because it’s raining intermittently and it’s horribly cold.
We settle for going back to the tulip fields we spotted 2 years ago. Surprise: there are no more tulips. Either the harvest is earlier this year due to the good weather, or it hasn’t happened yet. We see a few fields near Keukenhof, but the flowers are still tiny. We’re a bit disappointed and wonder if we should have taken vacation in late April instead, but even if the bulbs are planted today, in two weeks we won’t have flowers either.
There’s still the option of visiting paid tulip gardens like Keukenhof, or Tulip Experience, but we went there last time. After driving around randomly, we do come across some nice fields (of tulips, hyacinths – they smell divine). Not as impressive as last time, but still pretty (addresses: https://maps.app.goo.gl/XEBpwdeSi4eRxm9L6?g_st=isi and to pick tulips: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3Ac6Ae42DTL8rLAv8?g_st=isi).
I remind you: these tulip fields are for cultivating tulip bulbs, not the flowers. The flowers sell for about €5 a bunch, while each flower can produce several bulbs, and 10 bulbs cost around €13.
We visit Kenkenhof Castle, which can be visited if you’ve booked (we haven’t). Its garden and parking are open to all for free.
We visit Edam, a super cute little village named after a cheese. Here, time seems to have stood still. Far from its past as a whaling port, today you discover a peaceful atmosphere, with cobbled streets, calm canals, and its manual drawbridges. In a very colorful shop, you can taste different types of cheese (gouda, apparently), my favorites are: truffle gouda and jalapeño gouda. Expect €11 to €16 per cheese.
It starts raining, and we take refuge in the only open restaurant in the village (L’Auberge Damhotel EDAM). The dishes are more like fast food, but it’s nice, we’re warm, and the service is friendly.
We then go to the beach because I want to see what a beach looks like in a country supposedly below sea level. Turns out, it looks like any beach in Normandy. We treat ourselves to two hot chocolates. JB notices that here, there’s a machine that rotates, and inside it’s ready-made hot chocolate. We’re served as fast as if we’d ordered a bottle of water. Hot chocolates in the Netherlands will all be like this: pre-made and tasteless.
In the distance, you can see wind turbines with their feet in the water, yes, in the sea… They’ve managed to turn something unpleasant (a lot of wind in the Netherlands) into energy.
I wanted to visit the CORPUS museum, which is very well done, where you feel like you’re inside a human body in XXL version, but unfortunately there are no tickets available for several hours. Since it’s Easter weekend, everyone goes to the Netherlands, and you have to book everywhere.
I’ll see online later that if the tulip fields are empty or there are no tickets at Keukenhof, you can go to this little free park:
We get back to The Hague around 6 PM, completely exhausted by the cold and wind. I had planned a good cashmere coat and several layers of wool + cashmere, but facing this sneaky little wind, I’m terribly cold and my little cold that I’ve been dragging for a week is getting worse.
Faced with this miserable situation, only one solution comes to mind: treating myself to a good hot, spicy Vietnamese soup. We head to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in The Hague (Viet Street), and indeed, the soup is a great idea. The other white customers are there for bubble tea, only Asian customers eat. That’s probably because this restaurant serves authentic cuisine and isn’t stingy with spices & fresh herbs. I ate too fast so I only took a picture of the restaurant, not the dishes. Everything is good!
Day 2
We take the train to Schiphol Airport to rent a car. We didn’t keep the car from the day before because we don’t know where to park in The Hague. JB has Avis Preferredstatus, the car is already ready, he’s upgraded and gets a super super long car with a huge trunk. He doesn’t like big cars, especially since we only have a tiny suitcase. We can swap the car without any problem. What a relief!
We’re always happy about a hotel upgrade, but with cars, we’re not interested. It already happened to us in France to refuse an upgrade, the employee had negotiated to change our minds because it suited him for us to take his big car. Here, no problem. I find the Dutch as strict as the Germans, and it shows at pedestrian red lights because even at 11 PM, with no car around, no bike, no one dares to cross. Those who do are necessarily tourists, like us. I would have liked to live with such strict people until I learned that in Germany, neighbors spy on each other for noise and to sort trash efficiently ahahah.
Today, we’re leaving the Amsterdam area and will sleep in the countryside for a night. Off we go for a 2h30 drive where it rains, it rains non-stop, and almost no tulip fields along the way.
Giethoorn
It’s time to visit a small part of Weerribben-Wieden National Park. The Weerribben-Wieden National Park covers 10,000 hectares, making it the largest freshwater wetland in north-west Europe. In the past, this region was exploited for harvesting peat and reeds. The long ditches and canals that crisscross the landscape bear witness to this activity: each time a peat trench was dug, the extracted peat was spread over the neighboring strips of land, called ribben, to dry.
We arrive at the village of Giethoorn, which looks a lot like Venice. The only difference is that the beautiful bridges are mostly private and each leads to a house, situated on islets of dry land. Public bridges are much smaller. The upside is that there are quite a few shops and restaurants on these islets. You can thus cross the bridges of shops/restaurants and visit their tiny “islands”. It’s a mix between Venice and the Amiens hortillonnages. Despite the village’s “fairy tale” aspect, there are only 25,000 visitors per year. I get the feeling that half of them came today because there are lots and lots of people and the little boats are all full.
It’s raining cats and dogs and we jump on the first big covered boat (€9.5/person). The boat, according to Captain Jack, would be called Titanic 😀 They serve us free coffee and tea and off we go for a 1-hour boat ride. We look at the other privatized (and open) boats with empathy. With nice weather, it would have been a good idea to privatize a boat for €35/h, but not with this crappy weather. The boat tour isn’t very interesting except for accessing a very large lake (which you can’t do on foot). You can sleep here, but it’s very expensive and, above all, what will we eat in the evening?
After the boat tour, we sit down at a restaurant for a more or less acceptable meal (expect €20-22/person) and explore the village on foot again.
On the way back, instead of going straight to the hotel, I notice on the map a road like Key West (a little road in the middle of a huge lake https://maps.app.goo.gl/G3Pqx1fKiU81DYGP6). It just lacks mangroves and you’d think you’re in the Keys. JB and I take this road in both directions, all while reminiscing about our adventures in Miami.
Day 3
Today’s program is very simple: return the car, while making a stop at the windmills.
Veluwemeer Aqueduct
Obviously, looking at the map, I add a stop: I notice a heart I added: it’s the exact location of an aqueduct whose architectural ingenuity I discovered by chance through Facebook’s algorithm recommendations. In the Netherlands, bridges, even the smallest ones, can lift to let boats pass. But here, it’s the road that goes under the water. This will add 30 minutes to our drive, but I looooove this kind of construction. So despite comments complaining that you can’t see anything without a drone, I still decide to go see.
Looking closely at Google Maps, I find on site a bridge (https://maps.app.goo.gl/7XBLLB8A7xphbxSU8) allowing to observe the place well (my Google Maps is always in satellite mode, it allows me to identify points of interest well and find access points). With a drone, it would have been too awesome. Unfortunately, no boat passes at that exact moment, but being on site, I understand better how it’s made. It just looks like a big swimming pool over a highway. We pick up the car again and drive under the aqueduct to get a better look at the structure, and I realize it’s not very wide (10 meters?) nor very deep (3 meters maybe?), but I think it’s plenty for sailboats. However, to support this structure, there’s an enormous amount of concrete stretching for about a hundred meters on both sides of the highway.
Zaanse Schans windmolen
It’s time to visit the windmills. It takes us forever to get close to the place because there are too many cars and all the parking lots are full. We have to park on the other side of the bridge. But the weather is beautiful, even too hot. JB is upset to see so many people in this very Disneyland-like village. In all these years of traveling around the world, we only visited on weekdays, carefully avoiding big crowds; here we chose the busiest weekend of spring. Even crossing the bridge or visiting a shop requires squeezing your way through. However, the windmills are very beautiful, even though they’re smaller than I expected. The plus side is seeing several at once.
The Disneyland side is unavoidable. Many houses were brought here specifically to create an atmosphere worthy of the 17th century. Despite the accessibility of the mills, there are still boats to fully enjoy the village.
As we approach the mills, I recognize a polyglot linocut seller I saw on YouTube. At that time, I was really into polyglots, and I must have stumbled upon a video of this man. I had a doubt because he looks younger than in his video, but when he starts talking to Chinese tourists in Chinese, I have no doubt anymore, it’s him. I start explaining to JB the content of the video I saw, and suddenly I realize I still remember the content of a video I watched 8 years ago !!!. Why does my memory still hold on to this kind of info? That’s the problem with having a good memory: you remember everything, both important and not-so-important things, and there’s little way to erase them from long-term memory. Anyway, after watching his video (where the windmills were clearly visible), I thought to myself that there was a place with lots of windmills in the Netherlands, visited by thousands of tourists, and that info stayed with me all that time, along with the image of that polyglot 😀
Apart from the usual cheese shop, there’s a wooden shoe museum Wooden Shoe Workshop of Zaanse Schans, with free entry. There’s a live demo, but it’s too crowded for me to see anything. These shoes are lighter than I imagined. And they’re quite expensive (€70 a pair).
We’re a bit hungry, but impossible to buy anything because the lines are long even for just an ice cream. JB suggests leaving ASAP here, there’s way too many people. Eventually, when returning the car at the airport, we’ll get to enjoy a delicious Italian gelato.
We then take the train to our new hotel in Amsterdam (Booking link). Too tired, we dine at the hotel without doing any other sightseeing. Thanks to American Express, we’re still Marriott Gold and got upgraded to a higher category (bigger room), which is always appreciated (unlike car upgrades).
Days 5 & 6
Even though the room isn’t exceptional, I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of the bedding. I feel like I’m sleeping on a cloud. Every time we’ve slept particularly well in a hotel, we’ve noticed a mattress topper. JB checks the label name, and once again it’s the Belgian brand whose outlet store was 30 minutes from Lille but is now closed (according to Google Maps). I think we’ll go check it out one of these days anyway. In the meantime, we’re going to buy a mattress topper (the same one as my sister). The advantage is that instead of replacing a mattress (at least €500), you put a topper that corrects its flaws (more firmness, for example) for €150. It’s the best solution for us because the mattress belongs to the landlord, and replacing it means having to store the old one in the basement.
Het Muizenhuis – Winkel & Museum
We take the metro to get to Amsterdam. We’re a bit in the suburbs (to pay less, Booking link) and there’s a direct metro to the city center in 20 minutes. The first thing we visit today is a miniature house museum I spotted on Google Maps: Het Muizenhuis – Winkel & Museum. The saleswoman quickly explains that the miniature structures on display were built for a children’s book series. These books were even adapted into TV shows in France. We follow the mice (Sam & Julia) to the fair, at home, to museums, etc. She tells us the author is upstairs and we can ask for a dedication. On the ground floor, hundreds of books in several languages are available, as well as miniature kits. I’ll show you lots of photos because I love it too much, and we went there 4 times.
I bought a book in French (you can also find them on Amazon here or at Fnac) and the author signed it. She tells me she writes the book first before creating the miniature scenes. Then everything is made from recycled materials (here’s an example of upcycling). Then, for people who can’t turn a yogurt pot into a saucepan, there are wooden and cardboard kits, in 1/12 scale.
JB watches with me and points out lots of details (he’s tall so he can see more things), including a miniature mousetrap (while the main characters are mice, hahaha).
Flower Market
This is where you can buy seeds & bulbs as well as cut flowers. The prices are not the lowest, but they are lower than at Keukenhof.
Right next to the miniature museum, there is a waffle shop (FA. Stroop Stroopwafels) and it’s always crowded. 8€ per waffle though! We didn’t try it, but it’s very pretty!
The whole street is pedestrian, let’s check out some shops:
Right across, at The English Bookshop, they have books with hidden covers, just a few keywords so you can buy a book without being influenced by its title, author, or cover. I think the concept is really cool.
A few meters away, there’s a shop full of leather bags; it’s not luxury, but it’s not too expensive and has character.
Another waffle shop (van Wonderen Stroopwafels), poorly rated on Google Maps, with lots of hot air balloons this time, it’s very pretty and very expensive, with a long line.
Right across is a Pop Mart store. I find the toys really ugly but there’s a long line too.
Then, there are quite a few concept stores or stationery shops that I like in Amsterdam, for example:
- Rubberstamp Boutique : for stamps with very nice designs as well as bookplates
- the Otherist : this is my favorite concept store, there are so many ingenious and beautiful objects that I haven’t seen elsewhere
- at Rotganssteeg 25: you’ll find paper kits to create trophies or insects, much prettier than the ones in France
- Lyppens Jeweler : I find the jewelry very beautiful, very creative, rather “high-end jewelry”
We especially took advantage of the Chinatown in Amsterdam to stock up on Asian dishes. Because in Lille, there are no good Asian restaurants; and Dutch food is not extraordinary either. For lacquered duck, I recommend Wing Kee. It’s not the luxurious Peking-style duck, but rather a cheap version to eat with rice.
For bun cha (a Vietnamese dish we love), I recommend Hanoi Old Quarter Restaurant :
For bubble teas, I think there are now at least 10 per city, everything looks good in Amsterdam.
Chinatown is not far from the red district. We go there in the evening and it’s packed. Because of the windows where women in very little clothing wait for customers. I didn’t know that behind the windows, it was an actual room. I thought they were there to advertise a show. But no, any interested customer can knock on the door (in front of everyone), negotiate the price, and the curtains will be closed. It’s still a bit bold to do it in front of everyone; when someone enters one of those rooms, we’ll know why. Well, I find the atmosphere a bit unhealthy. The good news is that you’re not allowed to take photos of these women.
We didn’t really plan this trip since we decided very late where to go for JB’s vacation, so we didn’t get tickets to the most popular museums like the Anne Frank House (fully booked even a month in advance!) or the Van Gogh Museum. But it’s okay. Thanks to the good weather, we don’t need to hide in a museum at all.
On the last day, we walk to the Flixbus stop. We think we have plenty of time, but because of my non-stop stops in shops, we realize we might be late and have to take a bus instead 😀 If you’re in the same situation as us, don’t panic, buses are often on time and if you don’t have tickets, you can just tap your bank card.
5 hours and 20 minutes later, we arrive in Lille. JB has a day off the next day before going back to work.
