April 28th: Keukenhof Part One

We only had one full day left in Amsterdam, so we got up at 7:30 again to try to cram in as much as we could. We grabbed breakfast in the hotel, had some more coffee in our room while we got our stuff together for the day, then walked up to Centraal Station. We had a train to catch!

We picked up some round-trip tickets to Schiphol and were on our way. It only took about 20 minutes to get to the airport; when we climbed up the steps into the terminal we found exactly what we were looking for right at the top of the steps: a stand selling Combi-tickets to Keukenhof. Perfect! The tickets were good for round-trip bus fare to the gardens as well as the entry fee itself. We followed the signs to the buses and found a LOT of other people who had the same idea waiting in line. Thankfully, they had plenty of buses making the trip, so we only had to wait about 45 minutes for our turn. Not bad!

I actually remembered part of the drive from when Mark and I went last year. I knew we were getting close when we started to see fields of flowers on the sides of the road. We made it into the gardens just fine and started to wander around. I'll apologize right now...both this post and the next one are very picture-heavy! And rather than try to caption everything, I'll just let most of the pictures speak for themselves.

There were a lot of other people in the gardens, but since there's plenty to look at it doesn't usually feel too crowded. Zach and I eventually wound up at the animal section; they still had the signs that made me laugh last year about not sticking your hands in the pens because the animals might bite you.

This goose was eyeing everyone up suspiciously. When we wandered past the pen again later I think some dumb kid had actually just poked at the goose and it bit him.

We also made our way over to the edge of the gardens where you can see the tulip fields. They were different colors than last year, and it seemed like there were still a lot that hadn't bloomed yet.

A few fat raindrops splashed down but the timing was perfect...we ducked into the windmill while the shower passed by.

The windmill had a good view of the nearby tulip fields.

One section of the garden was absolutely full of azaleas.

And of course, there were thousands of tulips!

I love the colors in this section!

These aren't all of the pictures...it's hard to pick only a handful of pictures when the flowers are all so pretty. I'll have more in the next post!