Tulpen!

Yesterday my friend Louis and I took our bikes to North Holland and spent the day tooling around the vast tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth fields out there.  This cultivation area is near the beach of the North Sea, so we also had lunch and dinner stops at beach restaurants.  Of course, I had heard before about the bulb fields and seen pictures-- but being out there in the middle of them in mid April was quite another experience!  I have never been in the Netherlands at this time of year before.  Photographs cannot convey the intensity of the colors in some of these patches of flowers.  And the smells!  When we rode by large fields of flowers, especially the hyacinths, the perfume was almost overpowering. Imagine the smell of 100,000 flowers coming right at you! The whole day was a sensory experience-- sights, sounds, smells, and oh yes, sore muscles.  We did get lost for a while.  Well, not really lost.  As Daniel Boone, the legendary American frontiersman is reported to have said, "I can't say I've ever been lost. But I was bewildered once for 3 days!"  We finally did get back to where we had parked the car.  To see more flower photos, go to my Picasa site.