A million Tulips

You are probably already aware of this, but if not, the Netherlands is pretty important when it comes to flowers. It supplies 80% of the bulb trade, 60% of the cut flower trade, and 50% of the potted flower trade globally. Those statistics come from a fairly questionable website, so not necessarily accurate, but in any case they put out a lot of flowers. For just under 2 months in the Spring, a major garden, Keukenhof, is open to visitors, and if you've ever seen pictures from Holland, it was most likely taken during this period either at the gardens or at one of the nearby fields. For example:

As noted in our earlier post about our trip to the Netherlands (from May 2009, not January 2010...I know it can get confusing), we missed the world-famous tulips by just two days, something that Jenna had really regretted. We knew that we'd most likely never return from the US just to see some flowers, but we were down to crunch time with literally no free weekends before we were moving away. What to do!?

We came up with the plan to not go over a weekend, but just to make a day trip of it. So, on Sunday April 25th, we headed down to Gatwick for an early flight to Amsterdam. One of the greatest things about Europe that we can't talk enough about is the cheap airfare. For less than $75 per person round trip you can be in Amsterdam (or Paris, or Lisbon, or Dublin, or....). Back home, you can't get from Dallas to San Antonio (or, Kansas City, or Chicago, or LA, or...) for less than $200 per person. With a free weekend in Dallas, we would never even consider the idea of hopping on a plane in the morning to go see a park/museum/site in _________ and return the same evening. But that is the joy of living in Europe, I guess.

Keukenhof is about 30 minutes from the airport, but since it is such a huge tourist draw there is a bus that runs between the airport and the garden, which we took. We decided to start our visit with a tour of the fields that surround the gardens. We rented bikes from a stand outside the gates and headed out to the nearby fields.

There were hundreds of these rows of different colored flowers. Most were tulips, but we were surprised to see quite a bit of variety in species (though I couldn't begin to venture a guess at what they were). We ended up riding several miles through many different fields (and I think a couple of peoples' back yards) to see them all. Jenna was in heaven. For my family, imagine driving around Western Kansas, but replace all the wheat/corn with flowers.

After a few hours and biking about 20 miles in the fields, we headed to the actual gardens. I don't really know what to say about the gardens - hard to describe it all in words. In short - it was a huge park similar to the ones scattered around London, but it was full of all kinds of different flower beds and a few greenhouses. There were also massive amounts of people, and one pair of community clogs.

We walked all through the gardens and greenhouses and, well, there were lots of flowers.

After we'd seen everything, we hopped back on the bus and headed for the airport for our evening flight back to London. What an amazing day!! We are so grateful that we had the chance to experience this!