Keukenhof

We visited Keukenhof Gardens on 11 April 2025. There were close to one million people there (at least it seemed like it). This was a Friday, so I don’t know if mid-week is less crowded or weekends are more crowded. But it seemed like almost everyone was from out of town. We left Noorjik at 9:15 and it took a full hour until we were inside the park. Noorjik is only a few miles away, but there was heavy traffic and a good walk from the parking lot to the park. There was a short line to queue for the entrance to the park (less than 5 minutes). There are lots of options for food at the park, i.e. hamburgers, apple pie, strawberries and cream, etc. Everything was priced about 1E higher than you would find outside the park, which was a pleasant surprise. I’m still used to paying double or triple the price for anything in the US when it’s in a premium location, but in The Netherlands the premium seems to be only a euro or two.

There were a reasonable number of bathrooms, all located inside the buildings. I didn’t see any bathrooms outside of the main buildings inside the park. There’s also a bathroom just outside the entrance (next to where you show your ticket), along with a couple of souvenir shops, just in case you forgot to buy something. The park is not large; it was quite a bit smaller than I imagined. It’s probably 300m x 300m, but you can’t walk very fast because there are so many people. It wasn’t too difficult to find a bench when we wanted to rest our feet, but this site is heavy on walking. I really enjoyed the Whisper Boat tour, although I’m not sure why. On the Whisper Boat tour, you are basically outside the park into fields that are being farmed, so each row has the same color, whereas in the park you get smaller, landscaped areas, often with a mixture of colors. This day was mostly for my wife, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.