If you’re not from around here, you’ve probably never heard of Drenthe, a province in the east of the Netherlands. When I decided to make a list of things to do in Drenthe, I was surprised at how many there are. Some are a bit odd or obscure, but those are the places I like…
Tourists to the Netherlands visit, for the most part, Amsterdam. They might take a side trip to Keukenhof (tulips galore) or Zaanse Schans (windmills in picturesque quantity) or the Hague. I live on the other side of the country, in a province called Groningen, whose biggest city (about 200,000 people) is also called Groningen. That means…
Switzerland, or what is officially known as the Swiss Federation, is a country located in central, western, and southern Europe. The federal republic consists of 26 cantons, and the federal authorities are based in Bern. It is geographically divided among the Alps, Swiss plateau, and Jura covering an area of 41285 square kilometers. The population…
The Amsterdam Tulip Museum is surprisingly interesting, especially when it tells the story of the tulip mania: the Dutch bulb-buying bubble that burst.
A review of the Amsterdam Cheese Museum, plus everything you ever wanted to know about Dutch cheese!
It’s unusual for me to write an article about something that hasn’t happened yet, but SAIL Amsterdam only happens once every five years: best to be prepared! And this time, it hasn’t happened in 10 years because the 2020 edition was cancelled. The 2025 edition of SAIL Amsterdam celebrates both the 750th anniversary of the…
In Amsterdam, you’ll admire the beautiful canals, lined with elegant Golden Age houses. But have you ever wanted to see the insides? Read here about visiting the Willet-Holthuysen Museum!
Castle de Haar is one of the most fanciful castles I’ve ever seen, if you discount Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland. It’s got a moat, a formal garden, towers and turrets galore. Stunningly ornate, especially inside, it’s a medieval princess’s dream. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one of them and…
When you were little, did you ever draw a picture of a castle? If you were like me, the castle in your picture was square, with a tower in each corner, crenellations along the walls and a drawbridge to an arched gateway in front. I’ve been to a lot of castles in my travels, but…
Rows of pretty small houses and shopping streets lined with a mixture of hip and quirky stores, along with a smattering of “coffee shops” leaking the reek of marijuana out onto the sidewalk: this used to be my image of Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighborhood. It never occurred to me until I took a Jordaan food tour…
Groningen has three nearby manor houses or “stately homes” that are open to the public and furnished to allow visitors to learn about local history. I’ve written about one of them before: Fraeylemaborg, which I only half-mockingly referred to as the “ancestral home.” Another is Menkemaborg, a similarly impressive display of wealth and social position…
One of the first people I met on my recent week-long trip with Boat Bike Tours was a retired Canadian man named Peter, who told me right off the bat that this was his third tour with the company. I took that as a good sign. Disclosure: This is a sponsored post in that I…
I visited the Amsterdam Historical Museum (more properly just called the Amsterdam Museum) as an afterthought. It was on my list: one of the many small museums and other sights to see in Amsterdam that I like to visit and write about. That day, though, I wanted to see Below the Surface, an archeological exhibit…
When I went to see Below the Surface in Amsterdam, to be honest, I hadn’t done my research. Just a quick internet search, and I added it to my list of what I might see that day in Amsterdam. I expected a museum, a small one, in or near Rokin metro station, since that was…
My initial interest in visiting Mauritshuis, an art museum in the Hague (Den Haag), had to do with one single painting: Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer, painted in about 1665. But this outstanding little Den Haag museum has many more gems of Golden Age painting. A disclosure: This is a sponsored post:…
Berlin is a wonderfully diverse and dynamic city, and especially intriguing to visit as a tourist with an interest in history. In particular, Berlin is the place to go if you like learning about 20th century history, and, more specifically, World War II and the Cold War. I’ve written about a number of Berlin’s WWII…
I’ve visited Amsterdam – about two and a half hours from home – more times than I can count. Hamburg is only slightly further away – three hours by car – and I’d never been there. It was time. My husband, Albert, and I decided to spend a weekend in Hamburg and I was fortunate…
Rotterdam is famous for its post-war architecture, mostly because a World War II bombing in 1940 destroyed much of the city. Yet it didn’t just rebuild and settle in; it is still constantly changing, expanding and reinventing whole neighborhoods. On a recent visit, I took a tour of a few new buildings, but I also…
Very little of Rotterdam survived World War II. While this means it is not the place to see the Netherlands you expect – charming streets along canals, 16th century merchants’ homes, or picturesque windmills – it is the place to see post-war architecture. This is why I signed up for a tour with De Rotterdam…
I love castles, especially the medieval kind. As a result, I visit castles pretty much whenever I can. So this summer, as we were on our way to a vacation in Romania, we decided to make a stop at Burghausen Castle. I’d never heard of the place, but it was marked as a castle on…
Is the Erotic Museum in Amsterdam erotic? The short answer is “No.” What is it then? Thought provoking and sometimes disturbing
Micropia Museum in Amsterdam is remarkably successful, considering that it’s all about creatures that are invisible to the naked eye! Not for those with a weak stomach!
Banksy and Dalí on show in one museum? When I heard that, I was definitely up for a day trip to Amsterdam to visit the new Moco Museum. Moco Museum Moco stands for Modern Contemporary Museum and, like the much better-known Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum, it is located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam. The…
A review of Yotel Hotel Schiphol (a.k.a. YotelAir): inspired by capsule hotels, it’s worth considering if you have an early flight and little luggage.
Electric Ladyland in Amsterdam is one of the weirdest museums I’ve visited yet. The museum claims to be the “first museum of fluorescent art.”
The Cat Cabinet is a rather mixed bag of cat art – from movie posters and mass-produced figurines to Picasso and Rembrandt – in a beautiful Amsterdam canal house.
Ever considered living in a houseboat? The Houseboat Museum in Amsterdam gives a glimpse of houseboat life: a very quick glimpse, given how small a vintage houseboat is.
For this collaborative post, I asked fellow travel bloggers about their idea of a trip of a lifetime: If a person who’s never traveled far from home asked you to name the one place they should visit on their one-and-only trip ever, what would you say? I got so many different answers! I’ll start with the…
Whenever people ask me “How do you like living in Holland?” part of my answer has to do with travel. You see, living in the Netherlands means I can travel to other European countries very easily. In fact, I can drive into Germany in about a half hour. Belgium is about two or three hours…
It’s not the kind of sightseeing I usually do, but touring the Reichstag dome was so highly recommended by a friend that I decided to do it anyway. It was also a bit of a relief after all the grim history I’d been learning about at the DDR Museum, the Stasi Museum, the Berlin Wall…
At both the DDR Museum and the Palace of Tears, I learned about the kind of everyday surveillance that East Germans endured in Cold War Germany. To find out more, I went to the Stasi Museum as well. Disclosure: As at all the museums I visited in Berlin, I received free admission. Nevertheless, all opinions…
After my experience at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I was apprehensive about visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This, I thought, is something they will have to get right. After all, Berlin was Hitler’s capital city, the place where leaders managed the bureaucratic tasks necessary to carry out the genocide he planned. You…