Holland

We timed our visit badly on purpose — early May, tulip season, when Holland’s population effectively doubles with visitors chasing the blooms. Lia had seen photos of the windmill towering over fields of red and yellow and wouldn’t be talked out of it. What we found exceeded the postcards: an entire town, from lamppost banners to street signs, that has committed fully to its nineteenth-century Dutch immigrant roots, and somehow makes it charming rather than kitsch.

Tulip Time and Windmill Island

Every spring, Holland hosts Tulip Time, a festival dating back to 1929 that plants roughly six million tulip bulbs along its streets and parks. We walked Centennial Park at golden hour, rows of tulips blazing in the low light, then crossed to Windmill Island Gardens, home to De Zwaan, an authentic 250-year-old Dutch windmill shipped over from the Netherlands and still grinding flour today. Docents in wooden clogs and traditional dress led us up its narrow stairs to the working gears, the whole thing turning slowly against a bright blue lake-effect sky. It’s the only authentic operating Dutch windmill in the United States, and standing beneath its turning blades felt genuinely transporting.

Downtown and Dutch heritage

Eighth Street downtown runs warm even in a stiff lake wind, thanks to a snowmelt system installed beneath the pavement decades ago, and we wandered past bakeries selling Dutch letters — almond pastry shaped like an “S” — and a cheese shop stocked with imported Gouda. At the Holland Museum we learned how Dutch Reformed settlers founded the town in 1847, fleeing religious persecution, and how that heritage still shapes everything from the architecture to the annual klompen dancers who clatter down Eighth Street in wooden shoes during the festival. We picked up a bag of stroopwafels for the road and ate most of them before reaching the car.

Lake Michigan and the dunes

By late afternoon we drove the short stretch out to Holland State Park, where Lake Michigan opens up wide and startlingly blue, Big Red — the town’s iconic red lighthouse — guarding the channel where Lake Macatawa meets the big lake. We climbed the dune above the beach, then descended barefoot onto sand fine enough to squeak underfoot, and swam until the sun dropped low enough to turn the whole horizon copper. It’s a freshwater coast that plays convincingly at being an ocean, and after a day of windmills and tulip fields, the cold plunge felt like the perfect reset.

Getting There

Holland sits about 30 minutes southwest of Grand Rapids via I-196, and Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids is the nearest major airport for most travelers. From Chicago, it’s roughly a three-hour drive up around the lake, or a scenic Lake Express car ferry crossing from Muskegon for those coming from Wisconsin. Downtown and the lakefront are each easily walkable once you’ve parked, though a short drive connects the two.