Everyone plans Keukenhof and the tulips, and they are worth it if you are here in April. The other eleven months, these are the two day trips I send families on, and both are under an hour by train.
The Hague and Scheveningen first. The Hague is the seat of government and the home of the Mauritshuis, where the Girl with the Pearl Earring hangs in a room small enough that the kids can find her. Twenty minutes inside, then the tram to the beach.
Scheveningen is a proper North Sea beach with a pier, a Ferris wheel, a bungee jump for the teenagers and a long promenade of beach clubs. The water is cold and the kids will go in. Madurodam is on the way back, the whole of the Netherlands in miniature, with working locks, a Schiphol with taxiing planes, and buttons everywhere.
The cheese town
Alkmaar holds its cheese market on Friday mornings from spring to September. Men in white with colored hats carry wheels of Gouda on wooden stretchers, buyers slap hands to agree a price, and it has been done this way for four hundred years. Forty minutes from Amsterdam. Go for the ten o’clock start, stay for the canal boat, eat a stroopwafel.
Gouda itself has a market on Thursdays, and Edam does one on Wednesdays in July and August with the cheese arriving by boat. Pick one. The kids will remember the men in hats more than the cheese.
Haarlem is fifteen minutes by train and is Amsterdam with a tenth of the crowds, a great square, and the Teylers museum full of fossils and old machines. If the city gets too much, it is the reset.
Planning Netherlands with kids? Start with the full Netherlands family travel guide, or send me the ages and the dates and I will come back with what is really available.
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