The time to leave France was getting closer by the day, we were getting sadder by the day however we had a visit from Marilyn, the nice lady that owned the cottage, she was over from Melbourne and visited to make a few minor improvements, new carpet in the bedroom and new plants in the garden. It was really nice to meet her in person and hear her story of how she bought the cottage nad then renovated it by herself through winter in -10 degrees!!!
We decided to leave the cottage a few days early and travel to the Somme region to visit the WW1 battlefields and the Australian memorials. The Somme region was a 350km drive which was no problem when you can travel at 130km/hr on the motorways, we headed for the city of Amiens where we would base ourselves for the next few days, in the spirit of adventure we didn't book any accommodation there would be lots of hotels in a city this size.
We arrived at Amiens around 4:00pm and found a street with several hotels after going into 3 of them we drew a blank, no rooms available due to a big regional trade fare taking place in the city this week. We tried another 6 hotels around town with no luck. Bugger we should have booked in advance and not gone with the "spirit of adventure". Our next option
was to drive on to another town, we headed for Albert, which was the centre of the Somme battlefield region and our ultimate destination anyway.
After a comfortable but expensive night in a best Western hotel we visited the office de tourism and loaded up with local history maps and a map that took us on a tour of the Somme battlefields. The country side around here is totally different to the Normandy region partly due to the country side being totally devastated by WW1, it is very flat and apart from a few pockets treeless. The stories of the battles and the sights we visited were very sad there are a few areas that have been preserved and you can see the trenches and hilltops that featured in most battles. We visited the sights that Australian soldiers fought and died at, all the commonwealth countries of the time had many memorials and graveyards.
We made the pilgrimage to Villers - Bretonneux the site of the massive Australian memorial as well as the Victoria school, which is a school in the village of Villers Bretonneux that is sponsored by Australia and contains a small museum in the building, the school plays the Australian National Anthem and the town has an Anzac day service every year.
It was now 10th June and we had booked on the Eurostar train to London for the 12th we had seen all that we planned to see so decided on a visit to Disneyland Paris, why not we had a spare day. We set off on the drive to Paris, only 1.5 hrs away and booked into a hotel. Disneyland was going to be great, the weather was good.
Chris really enjoyed Disneyland but was a little spun out by the rides, her balance is not as good as it used to be so when we got off the really exciting rides she was getting a double dose of the spins. Chris's favourite ride was ascending in a large Balloon, the balloon was just like an old one from the 1700's and went straight up about 100mtrs, not for me!!!! World Cup Soccer was starting and everywhere had parties and big TV's, all very colourful.
Time to leave France, we left the hotel near Disneyland on the morning of the 12th and headed for central Paris to the train station, just as we hit the centre of town the GPS spat the dummy and would not read the map properly just when we needed it the most. Trying to pull over in the centre of Paris is like trying to stop the Melbourne Cup mid race !!! absolutely impossible, we went through a 4 lane roundabout!!!! they don't have lanes marked with white lines and i'm sure they all go by the motto "who dares wins"!!!! you just have to go for it and be brave!!!. After a very stressful 30mins of swearing and trying to find out where we where on the Paris map the GPS miraculously restarted and all was good again. I had enough extra grey hairs from driving in France let alone having the GPS play up.
We didn't miss our train and we are now off to London for a few days exploring.
