I must admit that my interest in gardening does not extend beyond planting something every summer that hopefully survives the season. Spending a holiday visiting a flower park is therefore not something obvious, but when you are in the Netherlands in the spring, a visit to the world-famous park is well worth it. Keukenhof almost obligatory. The park is also only open for a few weeks each year. All said and done, we got up incredibly early after one, by Rendahl standards, wet restaurant experience to go to the park, which is also celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
The easiest way to get to the park is by purchasing a combined bus and entrance ticket with the Keukenhof Express on the park's website. The bus departs from several cities around the Netherlands and from Schiphol Airport. From Amsterdam the bus takes about 35 minutes but note that it doesn't leave from the central station but from the RAI, an exhibition hall that you can reach by metro a couple of stops from the centre. We actually met a Swedish family who almost missed the bus as they were in the wrong place at the time of departure. Relieved to have made it on time, the man in the group exclaimed that no Swede would want to miss a park with such an ecological name. After a sharp look from his wife, he tried to smooth over his somewhat crude comment by talking about her academic career at a famous university. They weren't completely uncultured after all, he seemed to be saying. We just laughed, as we too had made this connection. 🙂
A tip is to get away fairly early in the morning before the biggest tourist streams arrive, on average the park is visited by about 26,000 visitors per day so you will not feel alone. Amazingly, they've managed to get good flows so we didn't find that there were any long queues at the entrance or for the buses. However, it seems that the whole community around Keukenhof has adapted to the opening hours of the park. About half a mile before we arrived, temporary traffic signs began to appear and the traffic was redirected. Road work, I thought a little tired, but it turned out to be the queues to the park that started already here. The traffic flowed quite quickly and when we saw the gigantic car park with cars and the even larger car park with tourist buses, we understood that some traffic diversion was in place.
Keukenhof is essentially a large outdoor park with beautiful tulips and some other flowers, including hyacinths. There are also a number of greenhouses with both tulips and other flowers, for example they have an orchid house where I found the blue-pink orchid you see above. For those with sharp elbows and a will of steel, there are also prepared photo spots among the flowers where you can arrange a perfect picture for your social feed. Here the queues were long and the smell of styling products heavy so we walked on.
In the greenhouses there are also cafes and restaurants but as you can guess from the lack of food pictures in this post, these are not great. Since it was chilly outside, we went in and warmed up with a hot chocolate at one of the cafes, but it was a rather dull environment and the food they served did not really make any of us feel cold. Better is to go out to one of the various food trucks that are parked in the middle of the park. There are also nice areas where you can have a picnic if the weather permits, it is perfectly ok to bring your own food.
Keukenhof is an incredibly beautiful park and you can probably kill a whole day here if you're a real tulip nerd. We were here early in the season and therefore not all the big tulip fields outside the park had opened yet. You can see some of them from the bus but you can also walk or cycle around the area to see these huge fields of tulips. There is also a small tour boat you can take to see more. We probably would have stayed longer if the weather had been better but now the whole trip took about five hours and it was well worth the time. Since we left quite early, we still had several hours left of the day to continue exploring Amsterdam.
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