Travel Guide: Haarlem, Netherlands
Visiting the famous tulip fields in the Netherlands was easily the most 'wing-it' portion of our trip. We loosely based this portion of our vacation on the article from
on Haarlem, which is the nearest large town to most of the growing region.
We rented bicycles from a shop near the train station that was recommended in the book, and despite the chilly temps and grey skies (but only 10% chance of rain), set out following the instructions of the shop owner to ride south along the train line for 40 minutes before starting to see the fields.
Well, he was definitely spot on! He was also very correct in advising us that due to the cold spring, we wouldn't see as much color as normal for this time of year. Many of the fields were quite sparse, and some were covered such as the one above.
After he informed us of this, he mentioned that we should try to make it to the
to see some additional tulips. We hadn't planned on visiting the gardens, but at his urging we purchased tickets and decided to make that our destination. Hint, hint, this turned out to be a very good decision.
Right about now it started to sprinkle...
Yes, I was distracted by the pretty flowers too, but take another look at the sky...
It eventually started to pour on us, and it was about 45 degrees, so this was a fairly miserable experience at this point. Thanks to the genius that is the iPhone/GPS we were able to determine that we were only about 12km from Keukenhof, so we rode like crazy to get there, thinking we could take refuge, eat our picnic and see more flowers.
While I wish I had photographic evidence of this portion of our adventure, sadly I do not, so you will just have to use your imagination. We finally see signs to the garden parking lots (hooray!), we are both completely soaked through by this point. M crosses the road to the parking lot, but due to the two way traffic, I wait for another break in the cars then walk my bike across, and once in the lot hop back on to ride back up to the bike racks. Well, I don't get far. I'd never had a flat tire on a bike, or a car before, but I knew exactly what it was as soon as I tried to ride.
The rental shop had given us a repair kit, but we were about 25km from Haarlem at this point and soaked and freezing cold. So we decided to eat the picnic we packed and explore the gardens and deal with the bike issue later.
Most of the tulips growing outside were in the same state as the ones in the fields we had already seen, but the ones in the hothouses were amazing!
Yes, that tulip is like 3ft tall!
With a much brighter outlook (and finally dry) we went to deal with the bike situation. M patched the tire as best he could using the repair kit with ever-so-helpful Dutch instructions, and the bike shop at the gardens was kind enough to lend us their larger pump to fill it up. They were also able to advise us that the nearest train station was about 10km away so we could try and make it there and take the train the rest of the way to Haarlem.
Considering the morning we had, our afternoon was surprisingly catastrophe free. The tire patch decided to hold and the sun came out a bit so we took a very meandering route back to Hillegom where we got on the train with our bikes, and managed to see several more beautiful fields in the process.
All in all, I would call this an adventure. While you certainly can't control the weather when doing things like this, I am very glad we managed to make the best of it, as this is truly an amazing experience.