Ride Holland Private day trips, airport and private jet transfers from Amsterdam

Things to do in the Netherlands

City guides written by the people who drive there. What is worth your time, what is a walk from what, and which day trip takes you.

A wide view across the river Zaan at Zaanse Schans, with green wooden houses along one bank and windmills standing against an open sky.

Zaanse Schans

  • About 20 minutes from Amsterdam

Six working windmills on a river bank twenty minutes from Amsterdam, and the remains of what was once the most heavily industrialised landscape in the world.

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Tall wooden sailing barges moored along the harbour front at Volendam, with the village houses behind them.

Volendam

  • About half an hour from Amsterdam

A fishing village half an hour from Amsterdam that lost its sea in 1932 and turned the loss into a living — costume, smoked eel, and a harbour that still looks the part.

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A reed-thatched farmhouse on its own island in Giethoorn, with a garden running down to the canal and a low open boat passing on the water.

Giethoorn

  • About an hour and a half from Amsterdam

A village in Overijssel with canals instead of streets, about ninety minutes from Amsterdam. The water is not decorative — it is what is left after eight centuries of digging peat.

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Curving beds of tulips in many colours through the parkland at Keukenhof, with mature trees behind them.

Keukenhof

  • About 40 minutes from Amsterdam

Seven million bulbs in a wood outside Lisse, open for about eight weeks a year — and the commercial flower fields all around it, which are free, enormous, and not the same thing at all.

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The Hague

  • About an hour from Amsterdam

Den Haag is where the government sits, where Vermeer's best-known painting hangs, and where the Netherlands keeps its beach. It is an hour from Amsterdam and it does not feel like Amsterdam at all.

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The Erasmus Bridge across the Maas at dusk, with the towers of the Kop van Zuid lit behind it and the river wide and still in the foreground.

Rotterdam

  • About an hour from Amsterdam

Rotterdam is the one Dutch city that does not look Dutch. The old centre was destroyed in a single afternoon in 1940, and what went up instead is the best modern architecture in the country.

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Utrecht

  • About 45 minutes from Amsterdam

Utrecht has the tallest church tower in the country, a canal built on two levels, and about a quarter of Amsterdam's crowds. It is forty-five minutes from Amsterdam and it is the easiest good day out in the Netherlands.

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