Day 1 Tunnels, battles and food.

As we left home Elizabeth took a photo through the car window just to show what we were leaving behind, pouring rain - what else? After picking David up when he finished work in London we headed for a hotel not far from Dover in order to catch our ferry in the morning. We were astonished to get a place on the next sailing as it was about 15 minutes after we arrived at the docks.

Our first call in France was the lovely town of Arras, with its gorgeous squares, impressive hotel de ville and the tunnels which run underneath all of the above. Whilst standing in the Place des heros looking around at the fascinating architecture it is hard to realise that the cobbles are on top of the tunnels which over the years have been used to store wine, market traders' stock and provided safe refuge for citizens and soldiers during the two world wars. The guided tour of the tunnels was great but some of those tunnels were a bit on the low side which made it hard on the knees.








Later the boys wanted to go to the memorial at Vimy Ridge. This is a huge tall memorial to Canadian soldiers killed in WW1 which stands on the highest point in the region so it can be seen from miles around. There are preserved trenches along both the Allied and German front lines. They are so close you could have heard people whispering in the opposite trench. It it now a beautiful place with grass and trees and seems so peaceful that it is almost impossible to to imagine the carnage and horror that would have prevailed at the time. In some ways that is almost as dreadful as the horrors of the time itself.






We were spending the first night in the small town of Douai, chosen to give the boys some flexibility about where they went on that first day as it is fairly near the Belgian border so if they had wanted to go to the battlefields in Belgium they could do so. Did I mention that they are both historians with an interest in WW1 and WW2? No? I probably didn't mention then that they had been told that they were going to be severely limited in the number of battlefields etc which they got to visit on this trip!

What can I say about Douai? If you have ever heard John Denver sing Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio you will understand about Douai. Everything was CLOSED on this Friday evening - we couldn't find anywhere to eat. We walked all around the town and then eventually drove out of town through several villages where we finally found a MacDonalds - or McDos as it is known in France. Great French cuisine!