The Bulb Fields by Bike

The strange part first. The farmers around Lisse grow tulips for the bulbs, not the flowers, and when a field is at its brightest a machine goes through it and cuts every head off, so the plant puts its strength back underground. The colors you came for are a side effect. They last a few weeks.

So you ride through them while they last: about twenty kilometers by bike with a local guide, all of it flat, with more stopping than riding. Hyacinths and daffodils come first in the season, tulips after. The fields are farmland, so you stay on the path and take the photograph from there. It still works.

Then Keukenhof: seven million bulbs planted for eight weeks a year, in woods where a countess went hunting six hundred years ago. About 1.4 million people come in those eight weeks. It is busy, and it earns it.

Amsterdam gets one day on this trip, and it starts at the waterline. The boat is small and open and built from plastic that was fished out of these canals. You are handed a long net and asked to fish out some more. After yesterday's seven million bulbs, it is a change to look for something nobody planted on purpose.

It is a competition, which nobody admits to caring about for the first ten minutes. There is a prize for the biggest haul and one for the most unusual catch, and by the second hour you are leaning into corners of the canals you would never otherwise have looked at.

The afternoon is yours, in a city with more museums than anybody gets through in one. Then back to Leiden for the farewell dinner, because tomorrow is a morning of windmills and then the goodbyes.

The boat down the river from Rotterdam takes about half an hour, and the skyline drops away behind you until there is nothing left but dikes, water and, eventually, sails. This is the day for the photograph your family expects. Take it.

Kinderdijk has nineteen windmills, most of them built between 1738 and 1740 to lift water off land that kept sinking while the river beside it kept rising. They still work, as the backup to the pumping stations, and millers' families still live in many of them. The mills are round on the inside. Kinderdijk's own staff admit this makes furniture difficult.

Four days ago you were explaining your job title in Leiden. Now there is a group chat named after a windmill, a camera roll in stripes, and a net's worth of Amsterdam plastic that one of you is still talking about.