We walked in to Edam to wander through the cute streets and past the canals. We had a walking route which showed a path through town, but didn't describe the sights themselves. We passed by several pendulum bridges which were quite neat. There was a church with the bells outside of the tower and not something we’d seen before. The canals had lovely houses along them with beautiful gardens just meant for relaxing. We enjoyed strolling past them all and admiring the plants which were just starting to come out. For some strange reason, there was a pair of stocks outside of a café which were open. Anoop tried them out and decided that they would have been rather humiliating. Luckily there was no one around to witness J. After our stroll we decided to stop off for a café and slice of cake and coffee from a nice little place along the canal. We then headed back to camp to pick up the van and set off.

We drove over to the fields around Lisse with the hopes of seeing some tulip fields in bloom. I had found a blog online where someone mentioned many of the fields where there are usually tulips. We punched the street name in to our GPS and sure enough, it actually led us to the right place! We then just looked around for fields with colour and drove towards them. We passed by a beautiful field with hyacinths of all colours in full bloom. There were dark purple, lilac, pink and white hyacinths stretching out as far as the eye could see. We found a spot to pull over and hopped out of the car. The scent was just incredible! We then drove back to a field we had seen earlier and found a spot to park. There was a lovely field of red and another of yellow tulips which were perfectly open. There was lots of plastic on the ground beside them so we figured they had just uncovered them after bringing them along because of the cold. We quite enjoyed them and then continued on our way. We passed another field of hyacinths and then stopped at a field with shorter, pointy petaled, cream & red stripe tulips and yellow & red tulips. All of them were beautiful and we were glad that we had seen a few fields. As we drove past the yellow field we had stopped at earlier, the tractor was already chopping the tops off to encourage bigger bulbs. Talk about a short window of opportunity for taking photos! 

We drove to a campsite east of Rotterdam which was right beside a river. After an earlier dinner, we headed off for a walk along the dike and enjoyed watching the boat traffic pass by and the birds zipping around.

The next morning we set off for what we thought was a bridge across the river. It turned out it wasn’t a bridge at all, but a ferry! Anoop hopped out to find out how much it was and buy a ticket. They said to just drive on and buy it on board. The ferry crossed from the other side, cars drove off in random order and then we drove on and chose which lane we would like to park in. No deckhands pointing you in the right direction or anything. The guy came along and we paid 3 or so euros to cross. Then we got to the other side after a very quick trip. The ramp went down with nothing securing the boat to shore and off we drove, first, since we were in the centre lane with the side lanes following as soon as the gates were open far enough. We drove along the top of the dike for 15 km or so until we arrived at Kinderdijk. It is a series of windmills which were used to pump water to drain the farmland. There were around 20 windmills and it was neat to see so many in one place. We went for a walk out past them and looked at the few different kinds. It looked like some were now being lived in since they are no longer in use. We saw a ton of geese with goslings and stopped to take pictures of one goose with at least twenty babies. We’d never seen so many before! We enjoyed our wander and stretch of the legs before hopping back in the van and driving off. 

We drove through Belgium and stopped just across the border in France. It was still light enough for a walk so we wandered through the countryside for a bit before making dinner. We had a nice spot looking out over the pond in the campsite.