Last year we visited France and ended up flying out of Amsterdam because it was the same price as CDG. We had 2.5 days there, one of which was spend in Keukenhof/biking in terrible weather haha. We'd planned on doing the Van Gogh museum our first day but ended up skipping it in favor of just walking around, because as soon as we got there I fell in love. I'm half Dutch so maybe I should have known that would happen! Regardless, I was determined to return to the Netherlands. I used points to book our return for this April and this time we have 11 days in the country (mainly because of how the points ended up working out but I'm not mad about it haha). My questions for anyone who has spent a good amount of time there:
I have a list of other cities to visit (Aklmaar for the cheese market, Haarlem, Utrecht, Delft, Den Haag (my Oma is from there), Zaanse Schans, Kinderdijk, Woerden....) and I'd love opinions on them.
I'd also love some feedback on which cities, if any, we should actually spend the night in outside of Amsterdam. I'm not a big fan of 1 night here, 2 nights there, where you spend a lot of time moving hotels & checking in/out of places. Even if it's more expensive, I'm wondering if it would be best to base ourselves in Amsterdam and do day trips to some of the cities we want to visit and then pick maybe 1-2 other cities to stay in (maybe Delft or Den Haag and Utrecht). Rick Steves says in his book that if we're going to spend the night anywhere outside of Amsterdam, to make it Delft. Opinions on that?
The other thing we're considering is a couple days in another country like Belgium or Paris again (because we really did love Paris). I'm both worried that I'll get "bored" in the Netherlands for 11 days, but also worried that if we do something like Belgium/Paris for a few days we won't feel like we really saw everything we wanted in the Netherlands.
Bit of background on us: I drink but my husband doesn't, so probably no brewery/distillery tours for us. Besides a canal tour (with Those Dam Boat Guys) we didn't do any real tourist things last time, so we will be doing 1-2 museums and probably the Anne Frank house this time. We'll be doing Keukenhof again and hopefully will have much better weather for biking, and the plan is to spend around noon-5pm biking around the south Holland area that day. Not huge art people but I love history & ruins. We loved the food and hope to come back home a few pounds heavier! ^-^