The great tulip hunt

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We set out this morning along one of National Geographic's top 10 tourist drives in the world. A pretty big call... as it turns out, too big for this time of year.

Running from Haarlem south is the main area of tulip fields in northern Holland - and they probably look great in May or June when the tulips actually bloom. Some of our sources said that the flowers start from about late March but they were wrong 😞 Bare fields with just a couple of stretches of yellow Daffodils and purple Hyacinths to give us some idea of what it would be like at the height of the season. Of course we didn't have to contend with crowds either. We didn't even bother going into Keukenhof, the famous tulip park even though it was just opened this week. At 15 euro each and little chance of tulips, it wasn't going to be worthwhile. We continued the drive anyway and saw the enormous flower processing facilities with their rows of truck bays for unloading. At 5 Billion euro per year, flowers are big business here in Holland.

Heading right down towards Rotterdam, there are a number of small seaside towns and we stopped in one called Hook of Holland. Since there were no tulips in the fields, Mel got a couple of bunches of hothouse grown tulips from the shop and we went to see the local lighthouse. Big and red and overlooking a rail yard and industrial harbour - not much interest really. A bit of a disappointing day but we did get to see some of the countryside. Oh yeah - Mel drove home too. First drive in Europe and not too scary after all!

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