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• Holland - Tulip Tour
• Holland - Eastern Holland
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• Belgium - Bruges to Brussels
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Bike and Barge Eastern Holland

To see the Holland the Dutch themselves know, and to see it by barge and bicycle as many of them do, join our tour of Eastern Holland. In this picturesque landscape livestock calmly inhabit the fields and the sky is high, wide and very blue, curving up from the surrounding horizon. Pretty towns are frequent, their houses fronting directly on narrow brick streets, windows usually innocent of curtain and scrupulously clean. Pastry is good and herring excellent.

Visits will be made to the Airborne Museum in Oosterbeek and the nearby World War II cemetery where young Americans are among the honored dead. At the Museum a documentary film relates the Battle of Arnhem and Operation Market Garden, the basis for the movie Bridge Too Far.

Our journey takes us to the province of Flevoland, once inhabited only by aquatic creatures as it was under the Zuiderzee. Such reclaimed land is called polder, and looks now as though it had always been the seat of farms and towns and even some forest. Bicycle paths made of crushed seashells are a clue, however.

Dutch bicycle paths, with or without seashells, are perhaps the best in the world. Automobiles are elsewhere and the other people en transit are bicyclists like ourselves. We also have the distinct travel advantage of sleeping in the same bed each night, as our barge meets us at the end of every day. Traveling through modern Holland, we can compare it with the visit we made to Zaanse Schans on the day we arrived. This open-air museum just outside Amsterdam has neat wooden houses painted green, old-fashioned windmills with wide “sails” and a historic shipyard, all dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. In our travels we’ll note that people still wear wooden shoes – they are practical on a dairy farm. Seeing them will bring to mind a demonstration of wooden shoe making, by hand (historic) and by machine (modern), at Zaanse Schans.

The tour ends with two nights docked in the Amsterdam harbor, giving a day to explore on one’s own the wonderful city of Amsterdam with its museums (the world’s largest collection of van Gogh’s is, not surprisingly, at the van Gogh museum), its flower markets, its cheese shops, its outdoor cafés. You might want to go to the Anne Frank House, you might want to take a canal boat tour, you might want to do both.

This week-long tour gives you a look at both well known and lesser known elements of Dutch life, in ways the Dutch themselves are fond of: by bicycle and by barge.