land of tulips

On Easter Sunday, we took a bus outside of Amsterdam to visit the Keukenhof tulip gardens. It was so so so beautiful. We picked a perfect weekend; almost all of the tulips were in bloom. A few weekends before could have been scarce; a few weekends later and I'm afraid most would have been wilted. Sorry for so many photos. I couldn't help myself. It was like a dream...

We rented bikes... with back brakes. It had been a while since either of us had ridden like that, but after we got going (and dodged the few too many people who didn't seem to know how to ride a bike) we were on our way. I thought we'd be riding on paths through the tulips. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case but there were numerous places to stop and admire.

After our 9 mile trek, we entered the gardens. As we returned the bikes, we noticed the rental line quadrupled in size since we had been there a few hours before and only a few lonely bikes stood to be rented. Thankfully, we did the biking first because I think we would have opted out if we'd chosen to after the garden.

Each year the entire park is redesigned and they create a themed mural of tulips. This year the theme was Holland so they created a Dutch house scene. The platform to view this was packed with tourists so it was hard to get a picture of the whole thing. The park is only open for 8 weeks a year and they welcome 800,000 guests or more to view the gardens.

7 million bulbs are planted in the garden each year. 7 M.I.L.L.I.O.N. And that doesn't even count the surrounding fields we biked near. Everywhere you looked, there were flowers. I'm so glad we were able to see everything in bloom. It really wouldn't have been as impressive otherwise.

The field below was one we saw when we entered on the bus. We thought about walking through, but by the end of the day, we were too tired and decided we'd seen enough. What's another few thousand, right?

After arriving back in Amsterdam, we found an open restaurant and relaxed the rest of the evening. Ironically, the people next to us were speaking a mix of English and French and then I heard one of the guys say he was from Iowa. Small world. Of course, I said something later in the evening and we found out they had just moved from Paris to Amsterdam. They gave us a few restaurant recommendations and suggested a few other things happening in the city. We ended the night strolling the lit canals back to the apartment... writing this just makes me want to go back already!