On the morning of May 24 we picked up our rental car in the suburbs of Amsterdam and headed for Ghent in Belgium. The road really isn’t supposed to take more than 2,5 hours if you go on the highway, but we were planning on spending the whole day on it, stopping at a few places. We had high hopes for the areas right outside Amsterdam where our guidebook said we can see fields of tulips from mid-April to mid-May. May 24 was pushing the idea of “mid May,” but we thought it can’t be that precise. It turned out it can – we probably saw a total of 5 tulips along the way. While looking for tulips, we ended up driving on really small roads and getting lost many many times. We visited the little town of Lisse maybe 3-4 times, none of them intentionally. The fact that I was driving a stick-shift car was also adding to the stress and limited our options in terms of parking (I wouldn’t dare attempt to parallel park with a stick-shift at that point).

We stopped for lunch in a little town called Sussenheim, which was supposed to have a castle according to our guidebook, but didn’t. It had, however, a nice store with many many different types of cheese and we got some creamy cheese with pineapple which was really good.