After a bit of time in Amsterdam, we went to Zandvoort, which is definitely not a place you'd fly across the world to go visit, but it's close to where Luminosity was, so that's why we slept a few days there. Because Luminosity started later than planned, we had time in the mornings and early afternoon to go around the nearby towns:

The 2nd day we biked to Harleem which is not too close but we had electric bikes, so that made things easier:

We went to the Corrie ten Boom house/museum, but unfortunately someone screwed up and our tour guide was never able to get in with us, so he gave his tour from the outside. It's a house that hosted a few jews during the war in a secret hiding place, until they were eventually turned in:

We went to the Corrie ten Boom

The Haarlem big church is magestic, even if the protestants gutted most fo the catholic stuff that used to be inside:

Mozart played on this organ

The catholics ended up rebuilding a new church slightly out of town:

interesting that they put a walkeay on top, nice for tourists

we took the stairs to the top

Nice views of town:

Haarlem had multiple museums. We didn't have time for all, but the Frans Hals Museum was the main one, so we checked that one out:

We then went to see the Adriaan Windmill which had nice guided tours:

the bridge closed as we were arriving, but it was pretty fast

the blades have sails you can retract when you have too much wind

The next day, we stayed locally in Zaandvoort and looked at its 2 small museums:

The last day, we went to a local park that houses a wild deer population:

From there, we went to a nearby town with a science museum that houses the biggest steam engine ever built and that was used to dry out a huge lake:

normally they used windmills for the job, but this area was too big

a big portion of holland was reclaimed from the sea

this was the lake which was emptied in 3 years of pumping

And that it for the Zandvoort/Haarlem area, after Luminosity, it was time to go back to Amsterdam