Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, at the base of the CN Tower in Toronto, is a lot of fun, and the Dangerous Lagoon is the best of it. It is the aquarium’s largest …
I am usually disappointed by airport food, and by airport coffee even more. So Café Flor, on Schiphol’s D pier, was a surprise. We stopped there in May while we waited to …
Two days in Amsterdam sounds tight. It is not, as long as the plan is about choosing well rather than seeing everything. The city helps. The old centre around Dam Square and …
Amsterdam is a museum city, and my week there was built around them. Van Gogh was the reason I came. Rembrandt, a royal palace and a former brewery filled the rest of …
The Night Watch set the tone for my whole day at the Rijksmuseum, and it left me with enormous respect for the genius that was Rembrandt. So it was a surprise to …
Tickets for the Anne Frank House had sold out weeks before my trip, so the closest I came was the far side of the Prinsengracht, looking at the pavement packed with people …
I have always been intrigued by still life paintings. I had heard they were where young artists started out, learning colour, light and texture on a bowl of fruit or a jar …
Three days in Amsterdam covers the big sights. Five days lets them breathe. There is time to see the Rijksmuseum without rushing the Vermeers, to give Keukenhof the full day it deserves, …
Amsterdam‘s Red Light District, known in Dutch as De Wallen, is one of those places almost every visitor to Amsterdam wants to see, and walking tours of it are very popular. So …
I passed through Museumplein more times than I can count on this trip. It sits between the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and Moco, and it is a short walk from the …
The Netherlands is small, and the trains are good, so a lot of the country is within a day of Amsterdam. I only managed two day trips: Keukenhof and Zaanse Schans, on …
At the end of April and the start of May, I thought the city centre would be buzzing with tulips. It wasn’t. Maybe I had missed the moment. Amsterdam was buzzing in …
After the Night Watch, I thought the rest of the Gallery of Honour would be a breeze. The Night Watch hangs in its own room at the far end of the gallery, …
