Most travellers come to Amsterdam in the first week of April, when the tulip fields south of the city turn the aerial photograph into a painting. We understand why, and we arrange those journeys gladly. But the Amsterdam we return to ourselves, year after year, is the Amsterdam of October.
The canal houses, in mid-autumn, belong again to the neighbourhood. The boats are fewer on the water. The museums, which in summer require advance queuing, are quiet enough to be walked through in companionable silence. The trees along the Herengracht turn, and the lamp-light in the canal windows begins, by five o’clock, to do the city’s most reliable piece of visual work.
We arrange our October Amsterdams on foot and water. A private apartment in one of the Nine Streets townhouses, with its own canal door. A private boat, a single afternoon, threading the small inner waterways. A morning at the Rijksmuseum with a curator holding us back from the crowds at the Rembrandts. A lunch at a restaurant in the Jordaan that will hold a single table for us on a Tuesday.
Outside the city, we go east toward the Veluwe — Holland’s half-known pine country, where the de Rothschilds once built a country seat that is now a hotel. Or south, toward Zeeland, where the oyster farms are in full work and a small restaurant on the water will cook the catch for one booking a night.
The Netherlands, out of season, is a country that rewards a slower look. It is, we think, the best time to take the country on its own terms — without the tulips, without the summer. Merely Amsterdam in its own soft, amber October self.
