Benelux – Itinerary

In September, 2024, we set out for a week-long trip through the Netherlands and Belgium — a simple but unforgettable Benelux adventure.

We flew into Amsterdam, rented a car, and spent our days exploring beautiful cities, wandering historic streets, and soaking in every canal, coffee, and cathedral we could find.

This trip was about flexibility, discovery, and good old-fashioned wandering – just the way we like it.

We booked the flights, hotel and rental car through Expedia. Everything went flawlessly. We picked the car up from Europcar at the Schiphol Airport. Don’t believe the horrible google reviews for this Europcar location, the entire rental car process was fast and hassle free. We had absolutely no problems with them. I think reading online reviews of any rental car operation is a bad idea – people are only going to post reviews if something went sideways.

To plan trips, we love using Wanderlog – we can both log in and add data, then share the itinerary with our family and friends.

https://wanderlog.com/view/aougvldbjp/trip-to-the-netherlands-and-belgium/shared

We stayed in one central location for this entire trip – Breda, NL. And we LOVED BREDA. We also loved our hotel – Hotel Nassau, Autograph Collection.

https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/glzak-hotel-nassau-breda-autograph-collection/overview/

We use the Trainline app for all train bookings.

We’ll have posts per city and a hotel review, this will be a quick overview with anecdotes.

Arrived in Amsterdam at 8am, got the rental car and drove to Parking Center Oosterdok to park for a half day exploring the capital city.

A tip for parking decks – google or use chatGPT for car park reviews for each city. I did this each night for the next days location so we could park on the edge of a city center, explore and hit the road with no problems. We’re comfortable driving overseas but trying to drive in old town city centers is definitely not fun. Check for decks on the edges of them or ones near metro/trolley/bus stops.

Landing at 8am felt like a smart thing to do given we’d have time to explore Amsterdam but the reality is, we left ATL around 5pm and basically got no sleep on the plane. So we felt pretty insane by midday and wanted to hit the road to Breda.

The motorways in the Netherlands were awesome. Signage is great, everyone drives respectfully and there are super convenient gas stations directly on the motorways every few kilometers. Know that they have automated ticketing systems across the country but our general rule of thumb was “drive the same speed as everyone else”. The locals have an app that tells them where the speed control zones are, just follow their lead.

A fun anecdote – we stopped at a gas station on the way to Breda and I bought a Dr Pepper to wake me up a bit. The clerk said the only people who buy it are Americans.

We split this day between Utrecht and Castle De Haar, which is near-ish Utrecht. Hour drive from Breda to Utrecht, 30 minute drive from there to Castle De Haar then an hour back to Breda. This was a fantastic day, the weather was perfect.

This day was devoted mainly to Giethoorn with a stop on the way back in ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch).

Giethoorn is a canal only village that was truly magical.

We dove into Belgium with train trips to Antwerp and Brussels.

The Belgium excursions were part of why we chose Breda – its train station was convenient to our hotel and the train to Antwerp, Brussels and back was fast and efficient.

The farthest we drove the whole trip – Lille, France. But boy was it worth it! Lille has a little bit of everything and is bigger than we imagined it would be. Definitely worthy of an entire day.

More Belgium! Ghent and Bruges – near each other and pretty easy motorway driving from Breda. We could have tried to use trains for this one but we were not sure how long we wanted to spend in each city so the freedom of the car was appealing. It also allowed us to go and come back different directions and see even more of the region.

A true full day in Amsterdam. We hit the main museums, the red light district, and just generally explored. Probably the most laid back ‘big city’ we’ve been to.

After a few days of heavy driving we took advantage of the train for this day.

Our final day – we drove this one and saw the windmills at Kinderdijk, spent midday in The Hague and then finished the day in wonderful Delft.

Drove back to Schiphol, dropped the car off and flew back home! The Europcar drop-off process wasn’t even a process, we pulled up, a guy looked the car over in about 30 seconds, said we’re fine and that was that. The car was such a great addition for this trip, it let us really explore!