My French Trip Diary -- April 2006

[all_else_hippy_pip]

18^th April 2006

 

                We started at Auntie Paula’s and Uncle Kyle’s and after staying there overnight. We left at 8.05 and headed off to Dover. There were a couple of hold-ups, and Dad left our reference number back at the Morrows, but it was alright in the end. We got to Dover about 15 minutes early and were allowed on an earlier sailing. 

 The boat was nicer than our usual Brittany Ferries one, with comfy seats and no screaming kids, and I had a nice tomato soup with a couple of bread rolls. After a quick visit to the gift shop, it was time to go down to the car decks and we landed in Calais soon after. We drove about for a while, heading to Dunkirk, but when we got there it was a bit busy and not very pretty. Dad assumed it had been bombed into submission, and then rebuilt.

We headed, after that, to Ypres (Wipers) in Belgium. The first time I have been in 3 countries in one day! We drove for a long time in and around Ypres, getting a bit lost when trying to find the Menin Gate. It turned out we had most probably already seen it while taking pictures earlier. 
We visited our first cemetery in Menin and took lots of pictures there; it was very moving and sad because there were so many graves.

 We signed the Visitors Register and then left, heading to Arras. There was a petrol scare soon after and we got lost a lot, before finding an open petrol station near the border. About an hour and a half after seeing the memorial, we got to Lens, then Arras and got to a Formula One hotel.

 We are now in a pub/pizzeria in a beautiful Arras square  waiting for our food – Dad managed to get me a Margherita pizza and a big screen to watch the Arsenal v. Barca game – where a squirrel is the only Englander on the pitch!

 

 

19^th April 2006.

 

After a night interrupted many times by snoring, I woke up at about 7.30am English time. Dad woke up when the cleaner knocked on the door at about 7.45, and after that we got up, showered and dressed. We had missed breakfast by the time we got down, but we carried on anyway, finding a supermarket on the way and going in buy breakfast. We bought rolls, chicken, yoghurt, water and a sandwich for Dad. We ate, moved on and then began our trek to Amiens, a big city nearby, mentioned in the book “Birdsong” a lot.

                It took about an hour and we visited a memorial along the way. Dad said that he and Mum had most probably had been there before when they came to this part of France.

                Amiens was nice, with lots of pretty canals and rivers and churches. We stopped to discuss what to do next in a very pretty part of the city, where a little stream ran in front of the houses and they had little bridges to get to the road.

I ate my baguettes then, they were very nice. We stayed there for a while, took a few more pictures then got onto the motorway, to get to the Somme and the memorials near there.

 We ended up driving to a memorial museum (Historiale de la Grand Guerre I think it was called) which took a long time to get to. We passed Mametz (the town, but I assumed the famous wood was nearby), and a couple of “sur-Somme” towns, but eventually we found it. It was very pretty outside, and very impressive inside. They had uniforms laid out as all the different soldiers would have worn them (green for England, pale blue for France), as well as real supplies they would have carried.

There were lots of posters, maps, millions of articles, paintings, assembled and unassembled guns, artefacts from the battlefields, sculptures – it took up about two hours of our time. Many movie clips were playing throughout the various rooms – Pre-War, War 1914-16, War 1916-18, Post-War – and many information boards were around that told you about various manoeuvres, plans, plots and progress during the War.

There was also a section of pictures by Otto Dix, a German artist, which were very affecting and sometimes scary. Although everything was very interesting, there was so much information and so many displays that it was hard to take in after a while.

I met up with Dad again (I had lost him in the halls) and we went to the loo. Then he went to see a 20 minute film in the museum and I went to the gift shop. I bought a couple of books – one of poetry and one with information – and a couple of Otto Dix and picture postcards, before returning to the car. I relaxed for a while and wrote the first half of this entry, before Dad returned with a few things he had bought from the gift shop.

After that we drove again for a while, and went back to visit the Devonshire Cemetery – it was small but sweet. It was quiet and peaceful up there after the museum. I took pictures of a few names that the soldiers shared with people I knew from Devon (with one exception) – a Tozer, a W.N. Hodgson (26/05 which I today worked out is poet William Neil Hodgson!), a W.Green and an A. Hitchcock! I also found an “In Remembrance” card from Broadmoor School, which I think is near us.

                Then we left, looking for a more famous memorial. After a lot of confusion about the direction we were going in, we found the Ulster, then we went to the Thiepval Memorial, which was nearby. It was very impressive, even though we got there just too late to visit the little museum. We stayed there for a while, taking pictures, reading names and admiring the monument. It was incredibly quiet, beautiful and peaceful there, and humbling when we tried to calculate the number of names written on the inside of the archway, on all four sides of sixteen pillars that made up the larger four that supported the structure.

                I signed the Visitors Register this time, Dad had earlier that day. We had stayed there for a while, so afterwards we headed home, well, to Arras. We found a German cemetery on the way, and took pictures. (We had originally locked at civil cemetery 10 feet down the road –very silly!). After that there was a lot of stopping and starting as we were not sure if we had come too far east or not. We got to Arras a lot faster than we thought we would, and now we are in the same bar as last night, waiting for our food. Then it’s off to our Cambrai Formula One for our second and last night there.

 

 

20^th April 2006

 

This morning we started at 8am in the morning – Dad got showered and went down to eat, and as I didn’t want to eat there, I stayed up in our room. I showered and got dressed, watching Scooby Doo in French for a while, while tiding up my stuff. Dad came back after breakfast and we left about 15 minutes later. We then went to the same E.Leclerc supermarket as yesterday to buy some supplies for the journey. We got petrol there after we had finished, and then headed off to La Boisselle, home of the biggest shell hole made by the British during the War. It was very awe-inspiring – absolutely huge, with lots of small shell holes nearby. We walked all around the edge and admired the surrounding countryside as we did so.

We got there just in time, as as soon as I returned to the car 2 cars full of tourists turned up, very well dressed – on a tour. When we had arrived it had only been us and one other vehicle – a camper van – but the whole time we were there they didn’t get out.  By the time we left there were at least 6 other cars.

                It was then on to the South African Memorial. We met a nice Scottish man at a memorial on the way – Caterpillar Valley (the name of the memorial – not the man!) – who was searching for his grandfather’s place of death (and possible grave too). Dad spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and then moved on.

 After taking a picture of a Scottish memorial statue, we went to the South African memorial, Deville Wood. There was a mini-museum and shop, which a nice Scottish lady was in charge of with her husband. She spoke perfect French (as far as I could tell) – but had not lost her accent at all!

                Dad bought a shell case covered with patterns and I looked at the Regiment badges they had there. As there were a lot of customers in there by that point, we went to the cemetery opposite the memorial, and then the memorial itself – it was very beautiful, with an inspiring motto (I cannot remember it now).  The doors were locked on the main memorial building, but Dad and I went around it into the wood. It was very big and so hard to see how anyone could have held it. In fact, out of 3200 South African soldiers who went in, only 143 got out alive.

 Dad left me and I went back into the gift shop to take another look at the Regimental Badges they had. I decided on a South African one, with Nancy (a springbok), the mascot of a South African Regiment on it, which cost £11. After that we saw the Scottish man we’d met earlier leave, after asking the lady about possible places his grandfather could have fought, died, or been buried during the War. We ate lunch in the car and decided on our route for the journey to Normandy.

We went Albert à Amiens à Aumale and then finally made it to Rouen a long while later. Dad got out to take some pictures, but I stayed in the car because it looked a bit too urban for my liking.

                We then drove to Caen. Once we got there, there was a lot of wrong turns and confusion about roads, but we made it back into another Formula One. We took our stuff in and then left again, because Dad wanted to eat. After struggling to find parking, we ate in a pizzeria in Caen, near a pretty castle-type thing and lots of other nice buildings that Dad took pictures of afterwards.

 

21^st April 2006.

 

Today was a long day. It started at about 8am as usual, with Dad going down for breakfast while I showered and got dressed and stuff. We left after 9am to visit the WW2 sites. We were looking for Point du Hoc when we stumbled upon the American Military Cemetery I had visited in 2003 with on a school trip.

It was very beautiful – last time I could not see the sea because it was so misty, but this time it was very clear and we could see the entire beach. We could see why it had been used for the landings – it was large and flat and the cliffs weren’t so steep.

 After looking at the map in front of the viewing area which explained the movements taken by the Allies on that day, we walked along a path and came to the graves. They were also very awe inspiring because there are so many. There were flowers on some of the graves, still fresh – relatives had been recently.

   There was also a beautiful little church in the centre of the cemetery, engraved with a message about sacrifice. Dad and I wandered around for a while, and then we looked at the huge map in the memorial that showed the advances and other manoeuvres that took place during and after the Normandy landings. They were very impressive as well, the colours made it very clear and the scale helped too. There was a beautiful statue in the centre.

 

 We visited the wall of names of the men that were never found or buried. There were thousands of them, and Dad and I again picked out or favourite unusual ones – there were a lot. After that we moved on because we were trying to spend only an hour in each place. 

                We then went to Point du Hoc. When we got there I didn’t recognise it and wondered if it was the same place I visited on my school trip in 2003, but after reading the information board and walking on, I found that it was. Last time, as I said before, there was a lot of mist so I didn’t get to see much, but this visit was a lot more successful. Dad and I explored for a long time, in the holes, up and down steps, underground in old bunkers – it was fascinating.

 It was full of the ruins of German guns and bunkers, most of them destroyed.

The information board had said earlier that a one Allied company took this base from the Germans. The Allied company had been delayed by 45 minutes through bad weather conditions, so their back-ups assumed the attack had failed, and headed off to Omaha Beach. This left them alone to take the base, which they did, but as they tried to hold it, the Germans bombarded them for days.

                There were also lots of shell holes, some huge, but not as big as the WWI one we had seen before. We could climb down to the bottom of some shell holes (27/05 -- we also could jump down the man-made holes/chutes into the bunkers). We took about a million pictures but they were all worth it. We took a bit longer than I had expected, and so we decided not to go to Bayeux.

                We then went to the German Batteries at Longues Sur Mer. I was tired by this time, and my throat was starting to tickle, so after we had been to the other guns, when Dad wanted to walk down to the farthest away of the batteries, I decided not do go with him. There were lots of loud school kids running around as I went back to the car, on trips. I ate in the car as I waited for Dad to return, and wrote a postcard that I had bought in the gift shop there.

                When he did come back we went to the museum at Arromanches, which was very interesting. Just outside the museum, there was a little observation place where you could look out across the sea to see the floating Mulberry Harbours. 

 Inside, there were great models of the Mulberry Harbours and lots of photographs that gave you more of an insight into how they were made. The floating harbour was the idea of Winston Churchill, so it was named “Port Winston” (I only made the connection once we’d left the museum, when there were several monuments explaining it). Dad went to see a short movie about their construction, but I stayed out and read the displays which included models, old uniforms, equipment – there was even an old army Jeep there.

Before we left, I bought a key ring (because I collect them) in the gift shop, then we went to watch a 7 minute slideshow about the Normandy landings and the Mulberries role in them. It was very effective, as it included real footage from the time. It made me realise how great a victory it was and at what price it came.

                After that, we gave up on Pegasus Bridge and went to do the shopping in Caen. I gave Dad the list, but he lost it in the car park when I went to find a loo. But I still managed to remember most things and we had the first list Mum had written to help us.

                Dad stopped off in a ferry port in nearby Ouistreham to see if he could get us on a ferry from there to Portsmouth to cut out a lot of the driving he’d have to do otherwise. I sat in the car while he enquired at the information desk, but when he came back he said the cheapest ticket they could offer us was around £180 or something, so he decided not to do it.

                We then drove on to Honfleur. Dad said he had wanted to see it for ages, so we drove quite fast as the light was fading and Dad wanted to take pictures. Luckily we got there in time, just before sunset, so we got some nice pictures.

   Then we found a pizzeria and ate again. There was nice moules place next door that we thought Mum would have liked. After waiting for a long time for the bill, we paid and left, (and, after taking a few pictures) rushed to the car park so we could get to a Formula one in time, as the gates usually closed at 10pm, and it was 9.30-ish.

 We drove around the outskirts of Honfleur for a long time, looking for hotels to stay in that night. Eventually, Dad decided to drive to Rouen and so cut out about an hour of tomorrow’s journey. It took an hour, and it was about midnight when we got to the hotel we needed, after a couple of tries elsewhere.

                After checking in, I brushed my teeth, changed into my pyjamas and then went to sleep (once I had been fetched a pillow). Even Dad’s snoring didn’t stop me from sleeping soundly until 7.30am French time – lovely.