In 1997-98, I lived in London and one of my favorite experiences during that year was seeing the spring bulbs exploding all over Amsterdam. Somehow I perfectly timed my first visit to Holland to coincide with a profusion of color and breath-taking beauty. I must say it was one of the most memorable weekends of my life. That and it happened to fall over Queensday, a crazy Dutch holiday/party in honor of the House of Orange. Anyway, one of the trips that I most hoped that Eric and I could take while we lived here was a springtime trip to Holland to see the flowers.
Amsterdam is a city built around a series of small canals. While it's difficult to retrofit space for cars in its cramped little lanes, the Dutch build great bridges with no steps (unlike Venice), so the whole city is exceptionally bicycle friendly. We rented bikes for two days of our trip and enjoyed watching Brooks get used to this new mode of transport.
At the bike rental shop, Brooks says "Uh, guys? I'm not so sure about this..."
Spring was creeping out onto the edges of the flower boxes and tree limbs, even though we were still chilly as we rode around.
Brooks grew to love cycling around rather quickly. On our first stretch of straight road, as Eric picked up some speed, I could hear him squealing "Wheeeee!" all the way down the block.
We zipped through the Jordaan neighborhood, passed the Anne Frank house (having both seen it before, we opted to skip the lines until the next generation is old enough to get something out of it), around and around the beautiful Vondelpark, and cruised through the "floating flower market" (the stalls were on boats moored to one of the canal edges - see the following picture).
One of my finds in the flower market was a bucket full of cotton cuttings. Dad, can you believe they're selling short cotton branches for the equivalent of $4 per stem!?
We were having such a great time biking and the afternoon was so sunny and bright that we thought it might be nice to ride out and see some of the countryside. We popped into a bike rental store - they were everywhere, since 30% of the vehicles on Amsterdam's streets are bikes. They even have bike parking lots next to the train station!
Anyway, we picked up a map and traced a route that the biker guy said would take him an hour, and would give us "a few good hours of touring". Sounds good! Holland's flat, there'll be lots of lovely countryside and windmills and flowers to see, right? Oh, had I only known... Before returning home later, we learned that:
A) the flower fields weren't in bloom yet. Actually, they weren't even close - they looked dead. Giving our bike shop adviser the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he directed us to flowers that would bloom later this summer. In any case, we didn't see a single field with anything resembling a blossom.
B) we did however see lots of highway, and lots of suburbia (are we really biking through a shopping mall parking lot!?), and lots of cars. Not a lot of other bikers, really. That should probably have been our first clue.
C) there is a reason that wind-mills are so popular in Holland. There is no such thing as a tail wind in the land of the Dutch. It's all head wind and all of it is strong.
D) my husband is amazing. Even while biking into a heavy head wind with a child plopped between his knees forcing him to bike as a duck waddles, he was still able to offer me a hand. How, you might ask? By coming up behind me and *pushing* me along the flat straight stretches as I pedaled pathetically into the wind. I really think I might still be back there had he not actually propelled me forward with his brute strength...
Perhaps I'm making too much of the wind and the exhaustion of a FOUR hour "ride of pain"... We did get to see some lovely little villages interspersed throughout our ride. We also got to see lots of windmills, some of them several times! (There was a bridge out at the turn-around point and the signs directing us to the replacement ferry service were all in Dutch. That complication was a low point). But we did ride by a sugar refinery and a cocoa manufacturing plant (those smelled good!). And we managed to snap a few good pictures of each other as we biked along.
I'm in front by the windmill near the end of our trek because by that point it was the only way Eric could be sure that he didn't lose me! :)
Okay, so that was a bit more than we bargained for. Thankfully we made it home safely and had a yummy dinner and a hot shower and hit the hay early. The next morning, we DID get back on our bikes (how, I'm not sure) and rode to see some friends. This is a friend of Eric's who he worked with at his first job in Chicago and recommended him for his current position in Chicago. It was great to see them and meet their newborn daughter and compare notes about lives as ex-pats and parents. After a chat with them, we visited the Van Gogh Museum (fantastic! See previous post) and the Rijksmuseum (disappointing. It's under renovation so they were showing only 10% of their incredible art collection). That evening we (amazingly!) did some more city touring on our bikes before turning them back in and walking to supper.
Once we were finally on two legs instead of wheels, I began to look more closely at some of the details we had been zipping past. One observation was all the different ways that parents came up with transporting their families on bicycles. I guess the creativity only makes sense in such a predominately cycling community. I loved these different combinations! Parent seat with two in-line kids behind...
The parent in the middle with one kid in front and one kid in back and a milk crate in the very front to hold the groceries or flowers or school bags, depending on the errand. I think this way would minimize sibling harassment.
And my personal favorite, "barrow-o-family!" A large wheelbarrow-type bucket with a bench for two kiddos (do you see how they retro-fitted a harness for their squirmy little one?) as well as plenty of cargo space for whatever else they needed to carry. AWESOME!
I'm pretty sure this would be disqualified as a legal child-transportation method in the US. (Btw, in three whole days, the only bike helmet we saw in the city was on Brooks's head! Yikes!)
I also have to tell you about the bed and breakfast we stayed in. The family had owned the canal-side building, tall and skinny, for years and both lived in it and ran their hotel business in it. Our hosts were friendly and helpful, the showers were hot, the bed was comfy, the breakfast was yummy, all around it was lovely! The guest rooms were all in the tippy top of the house, up three and four flights of very steep and narrow and spiral-y stairs. We actually had conversation with other guests about how you'd get things like a new mattress or a bathtub up those stairs (our only possible solution? Use a crane and bring it in through the windows). Trying to get our large rolling travel duffel carrying Brooks' pack n play up those four flights of creaky stairs was a challenge. Eric is amazing. And while Brooks often enjoyed crawling his way up those stairs on his own, going down was a bit trickier, so we usually carried him down in the backpack in order to have two hands free to hold onto the hand-rails. Again, here's another thing that wouldn't meet code in the US. I mean WHAT do you do in the event of a fire?!
Other details that I enjoyed as we strolled through Amsterdam during our stay... The interesting shutters on some of the canal houses. With some of them, you can still see how they were designed to be houses and warehouses and businesses - all in a single tall and skinny structure.
I love the antique pulleys and hooks that are still attached to the top floors of many of the buildings. We weren't kidding when we talked about using a crane to drag items all the way up!
The canals were still lined with the naked trees of winter when we were visiting, but can't you just picture what this place is like in the summer time? The canal side restaurants all pull out patio tables and people dine under the stairs, enjoying the lovely bridges and lanes. Gorgeous!
Our last day in Amsterdam, we visited Keukenhof, the world's largest spring bulb garden, and the place where I absolutely fell in love with tulips ten years ago. Nicknamed the Garden of Europe, their gardeners plant approximately 7 million bulbs every year and design the gardens to be enjoyed by 750,000 visitors each spring. It's only open during the bulb season, for 7 weeks March until May and the crowds are incredible, but you can easily see why. Amazing, brilliant color. And to think that we were about 10 days or so ahead of the "peak"! It was still just incredible.
The smart garden designers added a very fun rest area to the garden and filled it with outdoor bean bag chairs. Folks were lounging about soaking up the sunshine and enjoying the clouds floating by. Brooks loved getting to run around and jump on Dada, who was enjoying the snooze...
One of the more ... unusual?... things that we saw at Keukenhof was the antique fairground organ. Hovering by one of the main entrances, the pipe and bell and drum music machine greeted visitors with its extremely "interesting" take on pop as well as classical music. Brooks was completely mesmerized. Had we let him, he would have stayed all day dancing to the organ music. He actually drew a crowd of senior citizen tourists watching him enjoy it!
Eric actually thought the CD's were produced to be a covert form of torture. You could buy one and give it to someone you didn't like, but then how could you actually force your enemies to keep listening to it?!
Our flights on this trip weren't the best. Brooks FINALLY fell asleep on Monday night in my arms as the plane was landing back in London. We got halfway to immigration before he woke up. Poor punkin, we can wear a fellow out, can't we?!
To end this ridiculously long post, my favorite shot of the weekend...
Thanks for reading! :)
