Holland has an area of about twenty thousand square miles, and something over five million inhabitants, with the greatest density of population on the coast between Amsterdam, in the north, and Rotterdam, in the south, and the fewest in numbers in the region immediately to the northward of the Zuyder-Zee.
Wherever in Holland one strikes the brick roads, made from little red bricks standing on end, he is happy. There is no dust and there are no depressions in the surface which will upset the carburation and jar the bolts off your machine. It is an expensive way of road-building, one thinks, but it is highly satisfactory. Near Haarlem these brick roadways extend for miles into the open country in every direction.
Haarlem is the centre of the bulb country, the gardens where are grown the best varieties of tulips and hyacinths known over all the world as "Dutch bulbs." The tulip beds of the polders and sunken gardens of the neighbourhood of Haarlem are one of the great sights of Holland.
Besides bulbs, Haarlem is noted for its shiphung church, and the pictures by Franz Hals in the local gallery. There are other good Hals elsewhere, but the portraits of rotund, jolly men and women of his day, in the Haarlem Town Hall, are unapproached by those of any of his contemporaries. Fat, laughing burghers, roystering, knickerbockered Dutchmen and vrous gossiping, smoking, laughing, or drinking, are human documents of the time more graphic than whole volumes of fine writing or mere repetitions of historical fact. All these attributes has Haarlem's collection of paintings by Franz Hals.
There are all sorts of ways of getting from Haarlem to Amsterdam, by train, by boat, by electric tram, or by automobile over an idyllic road, tree-shaded, canal-bordered, and dustless. It is sixteen kilometres only, and it is like running over a causeway laid out between villas and gardens. Nothing quite like it exists elsewhere, in Holland or out of it. An automobile can be very high-geared, for there are no hills except the donkey-back bridges over the canals.
Amsterdam may properly enough be called the Venice of the North, and the automobilist will speedily find that an automobile boat will do him much better service in town than anything that runs on land.
There are half a million souls in Amsterdam, and hotels of all ranks and prices. The Bible Hotel is as good as any, but they have no garage, nor indeed have any of the others. There are half a dozen "Grands Garages" in the city (with their signs written in French—the universal language of automobilism), and the hotel porter will jump up on the seat beside you and pilot you on your way, around sharp corners, over bridges, and through arcades until finally you plump down in as up-to-date and conveniently arranged an establishment for housing your machine as you will find in any land.
Amsterdam's sights will occupy the visitor for a couple of days, and its art gallery for a day longer. We were taking only a bird's-eye view, or review, and stayed only over one night, not making even the classic excursion to those artists' haunts of Volendam, Monnikendam, and Marken, of which no book on Holland should fail to make mention.
These old Dutch towns of the Zuyder-Zee are unique in all the world, and Amsterdam is the gateway to them. An automobile is useless for reaching them. The best means are those offered by existing boat and tram lines.