The Netherlands in Bloom

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The Netherlands in the spring is truly a sight to behold. The countryside is awash in colors. In particular the small town of Lisse has the spectacular park of Keukenhof. Supposedly, it’s the world’s largest flower garden. With 700,000 visitors during its 2 month season, many people agree that it’s worth a visit.
However, the fields of the village have seemingly endless rows of flowers as well. Here are a few of my favorites of the village.



Here are some of the images from our tour of this lovely garden. I won’t belabor the images with a lot of commentary, I will let the pictures speak for themselves.












I love that Anna stops to smell the flowers…

This fat bumblebee doesn’t look like he should fly. He has had a bit too much pollen today.

These are our friends, Andras and Elvi. They have a really unique story: he is Hungarian, she is Israeli and they are married and live in Luxembourg, but are moving to Belgium. We randomly met them in a Luxembourg cafe after watching a movie. We started chatting and hit it off right away. So, we decided to meet up in the Netherlands to check out the flowers for a weekend.



Here’s another good idea for other parks out there. Put a nice comfy couch and people will just hang out…



The other really cool activity we did in Amsterdam was rent bikes. It is THE mode of transportation. It’s so convenient to hop on a bicycle, use one of the ubiquitous bike lanes and you can get from one side of the city center to the other in about 15 minutes.


The people watching was lots of fun…






The cafes were also lots of fun.


This cool puppy was actually wearing his shades (not just for the picture). He and his owner had matching glasses.

Amsterdam is a city that has so much going on. We could have stayed for 2 weeks and not run out of things to do. I think this may be our favorite spring destination. For me, it’s on my top five list of favorite cities in the world. We can’t wait to go back again soon!
Until then…
–Jim