Super Tulip Tour

Today you’re expected between 12:30 and 1:30 pm on your boat at its mooring, located across from Amsterdam Central Station. After storing your luggage and meeting your cycling companions, guide, captain, and crew, you can relax on board with a coffee, tea, or Heineken.

Today’s bike route will take us through the oldest tulip fields of Holland, including a visit to the Keukenhof gardens. This is the most beautiful bulb park in the world. Keukenhof has an overwhelming blaze of colors: seven million flowering tulips in a magnificent background of 80 acres of traditional and modern gardening architecture. You can also admire hyacinths, narcissi, and many other colorful flowers. For more information about the Keukenhof you can check the following website: www.keukenhof.nl. After exploring the tulips, we’ll spend the night in Leiden.

Today we’ll bike from Leiden to Kudelstaart, a small town bordered by the Westeinderplassen. We’ll go right through the green heart of Holland, an area with small cycle paths, lakes, small rivers, and lots of cows and sheep. Imagine that this Haarlemmermeer polder once was the biggest lake in Holland and nicknamed ‘the waterwolf’. Your destination for today is Kudelstaart: a small town bordered by the Westeinderplassen.

We’ll have breakfast while sailing in the direction of Amsterdam. From the lock at the Nieuwe Meer we’ll cycle along the borders of the river Amstel into the city, then take the ferry to the Zaanse Schans, a unique hamlet where locals work, with original houses and windmills from the river Zaan area. The hamlet is dominated by operating windmills, the oldest built in 1673, for grinding mustard, spices, paint, and oil, and for sawing wood into planks. As we walk through the village we’ll see a clock museum, an old-fashioned grocery store, a house with period furniture, a clog maker’s workshop, and a cheese farm. Afterwards, we’ll move on to Wormerveer.

From Wormerveer we’ll cycle to and through the most beautiful dunes of the Netherlands and, if weather permits, you may like to swim in the North Sea during your lunch break at the beach. Today’s overnight stay will be in the cheese town Alkmaar, a lively historic city with a variety of shops. Just under 400 heritage sites, canals, and harbors dominate this beautiful townscape. An ideal place for the tour guide to take you on an evening walk and perhaps have a drink on one of the many outdoor terraces.

Purmerend is at the edge of an area called “Waterland” where roads and water lie next to each other on the same level. We’ll visit the nice villages of Zunderdorp and Ransdorp. The better cyclists can cycle the long route to Edam and Volendam and, time permitting, cross the lake Gouwzee to admire the traditional fisherman’s village Marken with its typical wooden houses. When we’ve returned to Amsterdam, we can look back over seven days of cycling and enjoying a rich variety of typical Dutch landscapes, traditional towns, and local culture.

Our tour concludes after breakfast, with departure before 10 AM