I have been planning a spring-time trip to Holland since we left Australia. I wasn't organised enough to go there last year, so it was fabulous to make it over this year.
We spent a day in Amsterdam, which is somewhere Shannon had been before but I had not. We stayed in an awesome little B'n'B run by these 2 great guys God and Wimmo. They have it set up like a tropical jungle oasis right in the middle of Amsterdam.
I really liked Amsterdam, it is a city of contrasts. One side is made up of peaceful canals, quiet little streets and interesting architecture. The other side is the seedy red light district and 'coffee houses' that spew sweet smoke out into the street.
There are millions of bicycles everywhere, with very little traffic in the city. We even saw a triple decker floating bicycle parking lot on one of the canals. As we would discover in the following days, it's a great way to get around, and a great way to keep fit as you go about your day to day business.
We discovered these great cevapcici baguettes, which we tucked into just before our visit to the Van Gogh museum.
I knew Paula was thinking about a career change, but I didn't know she was setting up shop in the red light district of Amsterdam.
We caught a train from Amsterdam to Leiden, and then caught a bus out to Noordwijkerhout where we stayed in a huge hotel that had been converted from an old Shell research station.From here, we hired bicycles to go and explore the bulbfields around Lisse.
On our first day with the bikes, we set off on a 20km round trip through the fields around Lisse, in the heart of the bulb growing district of Holland.It was a touch too early in the season for most of the tulips, but there were lots of daffodils and narcissus in bloom and countless fields of hyacinths, which had the most delicious scent.
The ride was quite challenging, and we were knackered by the end of the day. Thankfully it was mostly quite flat, but it was difficult riding into a head wind at times.
In the evening we found a nice little pub to rest our weary legs and quench our thirst with a couple of Heinekens.
Cycling around the fields you see the commercial scale of the flower industry. It's quite like the market gardens in Werribee, but they're growing flowers instead of vegetables. One thing I didn't realise was that these fields are for the purpose of harvesting the bulbs, rather than the flowers. One day we saw a machine in a fields chopping the heads off all the tulips. This is part of the process for growing good bulbs, but the flowers themselves are left to rot on the ground.
The next day we visited the Keukenhof gardens in Lisse. These gardens put on a display every spring, which is a showcase for the Dutch bulb growing industry. As you can see, it was spectacular. The gardens are enormous, and are filled with every imaginable type of bulb.They also have an exhibition in a huge glasshouse in the centre of the gardens, which has a display of the more unusual types of bulbs and new hybrids that people have developed. I'm sure this was an arduous part of the day for Shannon, but I loved it and was oohing and aahing everywhere I looked. There were tiny delicate tulips only a few inches tall, right up to monstrous blooms that stood 4 foot tall.
Lunch this day was another triumph - we discovered hot ham rolls. Just literally hot ham in a roll with that delicious euro-style mayonnasie, yum!
We took literally hundreds of photos that day. We'll spare you from looking at all of them! But I have them catalogued for when I finally have a garden of my own.
This guy was fitter than we were! Below you can see the view from our balcony.
Our first walk along the coast was the short trip to Riomaggiore.
The colours of Riomaggiore really exploded when the sun came out. Below: a well earned beer above Riomaggiore. Once the sun came out, we both settled in for a little kip...
Manarola by sunset.
A soggy but thoroughly enjoyable walk to Vernazza ended with us chasing off the chill with a hot Italian special...
The obligatory shot....I haven't included my version.....you can guess!
