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Published: September 20th 2019
The main aim of these few days was to visit the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum , so more art and booking on line makes it easy. In fact the Van Gogh Museum has timed entry and is very restricted so we didn’t have much choice about when we could go and we saw many people being turned away at the door who had just rolled up !! So if any of you are planning on going there , book ahead.
At the Rijksmuseum we were there before it opened which enabled us to enjoy an early morning stroll in the gardens before we entered. It is so spacious with very wide hallways that even though there are lots of people there we could enjoy getting close to most of the paintings. The famous Night Watch painting is being explored millimetre by millimetre with conservationists working on it ...interesting to see. Vermeer‘s wonderful women and Dutch interior scenes as well as sooooo many Rembrandt’s had me entranced... there is just so much beautiful art there. I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed at the Van Gogh Museum...too many people , large spaces filled with a big shop
and lots of displays about the Sunflowers but then there is only one sunflower painting to see. Given that this Museum has the biggest collection of his paintings I was disappointed , I thought there would be more on display.
Wandering , walking miles around the Canals , taking trams and a boat trip is how you while away the time here and with many photo opportunities. We were staying in a hotel, in a very leafy area near the lovely Vondelpark with many very nice restaurants and coffee shops nearby , and we spotted that there was a Canalside House to visit. This is a gem of a place , a double plot house with a garden at the back on Herrengracht Canal and was a very rich gentleman’s house , beautifully preserved with lots of original furniture and features.... not to be missed if you are in Amsterdam... The Wilet-Holthuysen Museum . The added bonus seems to be not many people know about it so it was very quiet with only a handful of visitors going around.
We loved the trams and didn’t even mind it when we got on going the wrong way , we
just got off and went over to the other tracks ...and there was often a little kiosk inside the double trams where a nice person would be there to help and give information.
I won’t say very much about our train ride home from Amsterdam to Brussels and then Eurotunnel back to England except to say it was a bit of a nightmore with cancelled trains and delays and having bought tickets to Ashford we then found out it didn’t stop there , and it was extremely confusing with the web site saying trains were running when they weren’t etc !!! ... however in the end we got home not to Ashford and late and thanks to Andy who picked us up. The only easy thing about that journey was claiming compensation for delay which was done on line and we get a full refund so we can actually take another ride on the Eurostar !
I’ll be back home for a couple of weeks then off to Italy.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Joy of the arts
Wandering, walking, the canals and all those museums. Next time we go to Amsterdam we will stay in that hotel if we can. Hope to see you soon.