Travels in Europe: Visit to Keukenhof (2 May 08)

Keukenhof Gardens

Last Friday, we visited Keukenhof at Lisse. It's been 3 years since I last visited the gardens and i remember massive traffic jams and parking problems due to the volume of visitors on a weekend. So this year, we decided to go on a weekday since i was on leave anyway.

Keukenhoff is considered the 'Garden of Europe' and holds the world's largest spring garden exhibition. You probably need to spend at least half a day there to cover the 70 acres park. It is open for 9 weeks every spring (from 20 March to 18 May for 2008), and draws more than 750,000 visitors annually. There are more than 7 million bulbs planted including some 1,000 varieties of tulips alone. The best time to visit the gardens is in the later part of April when all the flowers - daffodils, crocus, narcissi, tulips, hyacinths etc are blooming.

It was a smooth drive there when we went on Friday early afternoon and parking was also not a problem although we had to walk quite a distance to the entrance gate. There were a lot of visitors there already. We spent around 4 hours walking the gardens and taking photos of the flowers and beautiful scenery. It is really an amazing place, a paradise of flowers on earth. There's even a windmill and a mini walk-in zoo with some exotic hens, rabbits, goats and sheep.

Almost all the visitors were taking photos intermittently, and some looked like professionals with their tripods and long lenses. There were also some who brought along their pets and picnic baskets to enjoy the lovely afternoon outdoors.

We left around 5.30pm but unfortunately took a turn to the wrong parking lot. It was only later that we discovered there were 3 parking fields to the north, south and north-west of the gardens. The parking fields were enormous - probably the size of 3-4 football fields, and to me they all looked alike, being open fields in the countryside. It took a while walking and searching for the car before we realised that we were not in the right place. Luckily we were able to re-enter the gardens and walked across to the right parking area. It was after the 6pm closing time, but the park was still lively with what looked like a senior citizens' cycling event with some bands playing as well.

Here is a link to the official Keukenhof website:-

http://www.keukenhof.nl/nm/english.html

and below are some pictures that we took during our visit.