Amsterdam’s popularity means purchasing tickets in advance is imperative to visit its world-class museums and historic sites. Book at least six weeks ahead for the Anne Frank Huis, where the teenage hideaway wrote her famous diary about how her family and others braved the isolation as they hid for two years from World War II Nazi occupiers. The tour starts with passage into the home’s Secret Annex through a revolving bookcase, and continues up narrow stairwells to the residents’ living area and bedrooms, most notably Anne’s room, the walls adorned with pictures of Hollywood celebrities, the Royal Family, landscapes and art.

Along Museumplein, the Rijksmuseum’s second-to-none collection of Dutch Old Masters paintings include Rembrandt’s tribute to local militia in the wall-sized “The Night Watch,” Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” and landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael’s portrayal of dramatic cloud cover in “The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede.” The adjacent Van Gogh Museum displays more than 200 works by the Post-Impressionist painter, most notably “Sunflowers,” swashed in the artist’s typical broad brushstrokes.

Juxtaposed with a modern façade in central Amsterdam, the red-shuttered Museum Rembrandthuis is where the city’s most famous painter worked and lived between 1639 and 1658. Hidden within a canal home nearby, Our Lord in the Attic Museum was originally a church, its nave squeezed within the home’s upper floors with two balconies overlooking a Baroque altar. Opened in 1663, it’s where Catholics clandestinely worshipped during the time of Protestant domination. The adjacent Jewish Cultural Quarter includes the Jewish Museum and the Portuguese Synagogue, established in 1675 for its Sephardic community, who were among the first Jews to enter the city 80 years earlier.

The Netherlands is about the size of Maryland, with much of the country seemingly within Amsterdam’s suburban sprawl. For a day trip within a half-hour drive or train ride, there are several historic cities and towns. To the north, giant windmill blades within the re-created 17th century town of Zaanse Schans still swoop as part of an open-air museum, which also includes Dutch cheese and wooden shoe workshops.

A 16th-century Gothic church dominates central Grote Markt square in Haarlem, which is also home to the Frans Hals Museum, dedicated to works from the Golden Age painter. In Delft, only one of the original 30 Delftware factories remains where visitors can take home decorative pieces of the distinctive blue and white earthenware. The city of Gouda holds spring and summer cheese markets every Thursday morning.

Skyscrapers tower above both Rotterdam and The Hague, but the latter’s Mauritshuis is a must-visit museum, housing Vermeer’s most celebrated painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” The nearby Madurodam features model replicas of key Dutch sites and neighborhoods lined with miniature canal homes, palaces and even tulip fields.

AAA offers non-stop flights from Portland to Amsterdam through Delta/KLM, which makes getting there even more convenient.

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