Aug 24, 2026
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Cycling in the Netherlands
Everything you need to know about cycling in the Netherlands: where to hire a bike, the rules of the road, the best cycling routes by region, and how to plan a multi-day Dutch cycl…
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Love Netherlands
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Dear Netherlands,
Every Dutch village has a bell tower, a market square, a brown café, and a bakery older than the country it sits in. The magic of the Netherlands isn’t Amsterdam. It’s the 400 other places that don’t need to try. Places like Thorn, where every house is painted white. Places like Giethoorn, where nobody has ever driven to the shop.
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Photo: Shutterstock
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In today’s email:
- Cycling in the Netherlands: A Complete Visitor’s Guide (2026)
- At The Café — Café De Doffer — Amsterdam’s All-Day Neighbourhood Bar
- Around The Web — Tracing Your North Holland Heritage: Archives, Records and Ancestral Towns, Maastricht, Netherlands: The Complete Visitor’s Guide (2026), Best Time to Visit the Netherlands: A Month-by-Month Guide (2026) + more
- From Love Netherlands — Edam Day Trip from Amsterdam: Cheese, Canals and Genuine Dutch Charm
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Oliebollen — The Dutch Doughnut of New Year’s Eve
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Cycling in the Netherlands: A Complete Visitor’s Guide (2026)
👉 Read the full story
The Dutch invented cycling as a way of life. With more bicycles than people — roughly 23 million bikes for 17 million residents — the Netherlands treats the bicycle not as a leisure item but as a primary mode of transport. When you cycle here, you enter a country that has spent decades engineering its roads, paths, and cities around the rider. For visitors, that means smooth fietspad (cycle paths) stretching across every province, clear signage, and a culture that actively makes space for you on two wheels. Love the Netherlands? Join our free newsletter for hidden Dutch gems → inlovewithnetherlands.com/subscribe This guide covers everything a visitor needs to know before setting off: where to hire a bike, the rules of the road (and path), the best cycling routes by region, and how to plan a multi-day cycling trip through the Dutch countryside. Why Cycling in the Netherlands Is Unlike…
👉 Read the full story
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At The Café
Café De Doffer — Amsterdam’s All-Day Neighbourhood Bar
Café De Doffer on the Runstraat in the Nine Streets has been a daily-life café since 1900. It’s open from morning coffee through to late-night last-call, and you’ll see the same faces drift through every part of the day — students in the morning, freelancers at lunch, locals after work, regulars after midnight. The kitchen does a small menu of well-cooked Dutch comfort food, the wine list is short and good, and the back room has a pool table that has been there since the seventies. It’s the closest thing the Nine Streets has to a living room.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
Love the Netherlands? Join our free newsletter for hidden Dutch gems → inlovewithnetherlands.com/subscribe Edam is just 30 minutes north of Amsterdam. Most people know the name from the round red-wax cheese sold in supermarkets worldwide. But very few visitors ever find the actual town. That is your advantage. The town sits quietly beside its own canals and drawbridges. While nearby Volendam draws hundreds of thousands of tourists each year,…
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Oliebollen — The Dutch Doughnut of New Year’s Eve
Oliebollen are round Dutch doughnuts, usually with raisins or currants tucked inside, deep-fried until the outside is crisp and the inside is light and yeasty, then dredged in icing sugar. Every Dutch town has at least one oliebollenkraam — a temporary stall — that appears in late December and disappears on 1 January. They’re the food of New Year’s Eve. The annual AD newspaper test of the country’s best stalls is a national event in itself, and Dutch families will drive an hour to buy a bag of warm oliebollen from whichever vendor wins.
👉 Read the full story
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