We selected Monday to visit Keukenhof, the world’s largest bulb garden, because its website says Monday is usually the least busy day of the week. The website did not reveal the other secret to low numbers: Aggressive drizzle, 40 mile an hour wind gusts, and spats of pouring, cold rain.
This is smacking of our visit to Blarney Castle but colder. The Netherlands Times reported that yesterday was the coldest April 3 on record here. Ever.
We did this. We brought the cold here. Sorry Netherlands.
At least it’s not as bad as at home, where it snowed overnight…(I must keep telling myself this)
Due to our lack of a good weather crystal ball, we booked our Keukenhof tickets on the plane over, for today, April 4th. It’s a huge tourist draw in the spring, with the peak season being the back half of April. The parking lots are massive and I’m sure the place packs up.
But not today, at least not indoors. About the only other fools who have chosen to visit are from cruises (those are still a thing?). People packed into the sheltered pavillions with all sorts of tulips in bloom, but there was still a lot of space to enjoy the flowers there.
Keukenhof is wonderfully manicured with all the bulb flowers of spring – daffodils, hyacinths, and some early-blooming tulips are going wild right now.
They also have several cherry trees clustered together!
I think my new favorite thing is hyacinths and I’m very excited to try and grow these next year in my own garden.
Our walk would have been decidedly more pleasant if the driving rain hadn’t mostly soaked us in 90 minutes. It started raining harder as it came time to leave. The rain clouds were not moving away on the radar. In fact, I think they were gathering together.
Time for lunch. We found a small vegetarian/vegan place in a nearby town and we thought that using google maps would be fine for ten minutes. It told us to take a left turn onto a sidewalk when we got close to our destination. Woe be upon us if we use this for navigation one more time. Back to boy band waze and apple maps for us.
And since the weather is literally rain for the rest of the week, after lunch we stopped at an outlet store. I only brought Sad Socks with me so I picked up some new running socks (I needed them anyway), and we outfitted ourselves with a little more waterproof gear.
The shopkeepers all tell us this is unusually cold and rainy for this time of year. Yes. Of course. The headline is “rain through saturday” and we leave…Sunday.
Lunched and geared, we went for a short drive into nearby Haarlem. Most of the museums are closed today, but it has a neat church, and I always like walking around in new cities. And because we purchased gear – the rain stopped for the hour or so we were in Haarlem. Yes!
Haarlem is the OG Harlem in New York (which was originally New Amsterdam). I particularly enjoy all the buildings that have fabulous eyelashes.
Our stop was the St Bavo Church, which opened its doors in the late 1400s. It is home to a massive pipe organ that was played at one point by Mozart and Handel. The pipe organ is undergoing restoration now, as it has been damaged by bats over the years. As part of the restoration process, they built a separate space for the bats to live, and will be restoring the organ to its original tin-gilded glory.
The interior is of course spectacular, filled with many small chapels and art. Since the organ is undergoing renovation, the thing that I found most fascinating were all the gravestones underfoot. If you were rich enough, you got to be buried underneath the church. I feel like churches are the least safe place to be during a zombie apocalypse in Europe.
After a brief stop for cheese, we headed home – and with good timing, because after about five minutes in the car, the rain decided to come at us horizontally again.
Tomorrow: more rain and museums in Amsterdam!