Days

Do not nap. The only real cure for a westbound red-eye is daylight, and October only gives you about eleven hours of it, so spend the first one outside. Sort your travel card before anything else: since 2023 every train, bus, metro and tram in the country takes a contactless bank card directly — tap the same card in and out and skip the ticket machines entirely.

Teylers is the oldest museum in the country, open since 1784, and several of its rooms have never had electric light installed — they are lit through the roof and they shut an hour early in winter, so go there first while the light holds. Afterwards, Jopenkerk is a working brewery inside a deconsecrated church on the Gedempte Voldersgracht; you drink under the vaulting.

Tickets go on sale on Tuesdays at 10:00 for the week six weeks later, and they are gone the same morning. Nothing is sold at the door — the Tuesday is the entire mechanism, so set an alarm for it. The museum's own figure for a visit is about an hour.

The hofjes — seventeenth-century almshouse courtyards behind plain street doors, built for widows and the elderly poor — are the reason to walk here rather than anywhere else, and the Jordaan has more of them than any other part of the city. Karthuizerhof on Karthuizerstraat is the one to try. Go in only if the gate is already open, keep your voice down, and close it behind you; people still live around all of them. Winkel 43 on the corner of the Noordermarkt is the apple pie everybody means, and the queue outside is the review.

Lovers sail from Prins Hendrikkade 25, straight across from Centraal, and have done since 1956. Departures run every twenty to thirty minutes, so this is the one thing on the day you do not have to time to the minute — but go before the light does. Sunset is quarter to seven, and the bridges are worth seeing while you can still see them.

Walk the north side of the pond along the Lange Vijverberg and look back across the water; that is the side the reflection comes from, and the one angle where the building works are not the subject. The small octagonal turret standing out over the water at the Mauritshuis end is Het Torentje. It began as a summer gazebo for the counts of Holland, it is first mentioned in 1354, and it has been the Prime Minister's office since 1982.

Buy the ticket online before you go. The way in is not the front door of the mansion — a glass lift and a staircase on the forecourt drop you six metres into a foyer underneath it, and the tickets, the cloakroom and the shop are all down there. There are three Vermeers in the building, out of the thirty that exist anywhere; see Girl with a Pearl Earring first or last and not in between, because it is the one room where everybody stops moving.

The passage under the middle of the building is a public road — one of the few places anywhere that a thoroughfare runs straight through a museum, and it exists because the city made it a condition of the land in the 1880s. The way in is off the passage itself: two glass entrances under the archway. The gardens need no ticket either — walk through the passage and turn left or right when you come out the far side.

Book the earliest slot they will give you. The multimedia guide quotes his letters rather than explaining the paintings, which is the reason to carry one — and the top floor is the letters themselves, shown next to the pictures they are about. The museum is five minutes across the Museumplein from the Rijksmuseum, so this is one stop with two doors.

The Amstel section runs out along one bank and comes back along the other, so pick a spot and the same runners pass you twice — once looking fine and once not. If you want the crowd instead of the quiet, Overamstel and Van der Madeweg both sit right on the course, so you come up out of the metro into the noise. The last kilometre into the Olympic Stadium is the loudest free stretch of the whole thing.

The ferry leaves from the back of Centraal — the water side, not the square — every fifteen minutes in the daytime, and it costs nothing, bicycles included. STRAAT is the street-art museum on the yard, and in October the fact that it has a roof is not a small point. Pllek is the one built out of shipping containers, with a beach somebody put there on purpose. It trades every day of the week from half nine in the morning, and the terrace is the seasonal half of it rather than the place itself — the room inside is where you will end up.

Everything worth stopping for is along the Plaszoom on the east side, starting with the hertenkamp, where about twenty-five fallow deer and a few unbothered peacocks come right up to the fence. Ride the full loop rather than cutting across; the skyline only lines up from the far bank. You pass De Ster and De Lelie on the way round — two snuff and spice mills, 1829 and 1777, the last working pair of their kind in the country — but they open their doors on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays only, so today they are something you ride past rather than go into.

From the deck, look east along the Maas and find two things. The white slab with a 45-degree slice cut out of its face is the Willemswerf on the Boompjes — Jackie Chan slid down that slope with no rope in Who Am I? in 1998. Just past it at the Oudehaven is Het Witte Huis, 1898, forty-three metres of art nouveau that was the first high-rise in Europe and one of the handful of buildings in the centre still standing after May 1940. Go up while the light still holds; October takes it early.

Buy the food before you come rather than looking for it here — the Markthal is the obvious stop on the way in, and you can walk out in ten minutes with cheese, bread, fruit and a bag of stroopwafels, then straight out under the Cube Houses next door. Once you are in the park, head for the lawns on the river side: the Erasmusbrug sits across the water and the Euromast is at your back. There is a wooden Norwegian seamen's church tucked into the west end, built in 1914, which makes no sense at all until you remember this is a port and Norwegian crews needed somewhere to go.

Nothing to organise and nothing to look up. It is handled.