Keukenhof, the Flower Park

It is a splendid garden that opens every year from late March to May and hosts one of the world's largest collections of tulips. From Amsterdam station take a train to Leiden and from Leiden station take bus no. 54. You get shaken about a bit but in the end after a 15-minute journey (an hour in total) you arrive at the park. On the way back there is quite a scrum for the bus… it looks like a winter morning at a bus stop in Rome at 7.30 am. It is not a pretty sight, also because being shoved when you are on holiday is honestly annoying, and the craftiest are the Italians, needless to say… The queue to enter the park is really long!! There is a crazy crowd and you can understand it just by reading the statistics: several million visitors for a few weeks of opening… I'd like to see whether there would be a queue even with an 18€ entry ticket. The gardens are truly wonderful.

Flowers and above all tulips of every kind and colour, and above all kept beautifully, always very lovely and very well tended. Everything is truly perfect, you will take thousands of photographs. Obviously there are also numerous kiosks and restaurants to eat; there is also the chance to take a boat trip along a canal to admire the flower fields (but the queue was really too long and the trip expensive). There is also the chance to buy bulbs. They are extremely well equipped: you can buy bulbs from a catalogue and then they will ship the products to your home, shortly before planting time. They are truly super organised. You must make a minimum purchase of 40€ (if I remember correctly) but in the end you can also skip it, because they are set up for online purchases comfortably from your sofa.

If instead you are tempted to buy individual bulbs, then you must go to the shops in Amsterdam, because they are not sold in the park.