If you have time for only one castle jaunt, make it to richly furnished De Haar. Like most castles, it has had its ups and downs -- fires and ransackings and the like -- over the centuries, but thanks to an infusion of Rothschild money in the early 1900s, it now sits in all its 15th-century moated splendor in the middle of a gracious Versailles-like formal garden. After a disastrous fire in the 1800s it was reconstructed in 1892 to the designs of architect Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers, who was responsible for Amsterdam's Centraal Station and Rijksmuseum. Cuypers's craftsmen worked with medieval techniques to an extraordinary degree of detail. The trouble now is that the weight of this construction atop the original foundations is making them subside into the moat! Its walls, however, still hold many fine paintings and precious Gobelin tapestries of the 14th and 15th centuries; its floors are softened with Persian rugs; and its chambers are furnished in the styles of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI of France. Don't miss the magnificent formal gardens.