More from Dutch-land

I'm very much an impromptu traveler. Spur of the moment - that's pretty much how my travels are planed and defined these days. I booked the trip to Amsterdam just earlier this week, having felt somewhat "stifled" after a long weekend in Paris. If it wasn't for an earlier commitment that I had made, I would've taken a getaway trip last weekend as well. There're plenty of weekend travel offers in France; they're not exactly cheap if you're a dernier minute traveler like me, but I do like the variety of "weekend voyage packages" to wonderful European cities that they offer: Prague, Brussels, London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Barcelona, Madrid or other short getaways in France -  Cote d'Azur, Brittany, Normandy or if you're into exotic places like Morocco, Tunisia, Croatia and Greek islands, there are very cheap deals available too, especially if you plan ahead of time. With long annual vacations (the Europeans get on average, 5 weeks of vacation time per year!) and spoilt with such great choices of travel destinations, most of them at a steal if planned ahead of time, there's very little excuses to not travel and see the world!

After couple days of exploring the city,  I decided to book an excursion trip late last evening to see the beautiful Dutch countryside today.

I arrived at the meeting point - Damtrak 26 just right across the Central Station - bright and early. The tour bus was there right on time and in just under 20 minutes, we arrived at the beautiful open-air conservation of Zaanse Schans,  a neighborhood built in the 16th century with fully functioning windmills, cheese factory and farm mills.

The tulip season has come and gone but the views are still breathtaking

We also got to tour the cheese farm and sampled some great goudas.

 My favorites were the smoked gouda and pesto gouda.

After the cheese-tasting and spending quite a bit of time at the cheese shop, we had very little time left to enjoy the view of windmills. Being part of a tour group sets time limit on your travels and whilst you get the benefit or organized tours, you lose schedule flexibility and sightseeing at your own leisure, which was why I've always tried to avoid joining tours as much as I could. Nonetheless, I did manage to get more snapshots of the statuesque windmills

Our next stop was the fishing village of Volendam. This was the only picture I took

It was rather touristy and I didn't think there was anything special about the fishing village; so did Audrey, the lady I met during the tour. She was from New York, also traveling alone and we struck a conversation as soon as we sat next to each other in the bus. Audrey just graduated with a PhD on English literature; having been in school for almost a decade, she was one of the more fortunate ones to find a job during and shared that many graduates had to abandon their field and do something completely different in order to survive during these tough times. One of the nice things about traveling is meeting people from all walks of life, listening to their stories and in my case, finding someone to take my picture, in exchange for snapping theirs! D gave me his sophisticated and extremely heavy tripod; I kept it where it belongs - the closet. Anyway, Audrey and I had lunch together at Volendam. We had the traditional Amsterdam kippeling, i.e their version of fish (we had cod fish) and chips. 

After lunch, we took a ferry ride across the waters to a little island called Markem where we visited the clog factory. I wasn't too interested in clogs, but there were lots of other little treasures to be had.

One of my favorite photos of the day

If you're visiting Amsterdam and want to get a little bit of that Dutch countryside experience that doesn't take up a whole day, I would highly recommend visiting the windmills in the outskirts of the city. Here's the tour company I used and it was a rather pleasant experience, not to mention very convenient as I had only booked the tour online less than 24-hours prior. Last minute didn't turn out that bad after all!