Blogs from Ypres, West Flanders, Belgium, Europe - page 2

I was awake early after my restless night of camping out in the storm and a good job too as my plan was to tour around the World War I battlefields so I would need plenty of time to explore. My Eyewitness Travel guide recommended to see everything within two days, but as I only had one day, I chose my key interests carefully. My guidebook recommended starting at Diksmuide and driving down towards Ypres, or Ieper to the locals! Local people that I spoke to recommended finishing my day at Ypres because of the last post, played by buglers at Menin Gate, in memory of the 55,000 missing commonwealth soldiers. The last post is played at 8pm but I decided that I didn't want to drive around Belgium when getting late and also wanted to ... read more

The last days of our holiday had arrived and we had just a few days left before we returned home to Britain. We had bitten the bullet and paid the £14 excess to come home early by one day. Luxembourg had been a bit of a disaster as there was going to be an Octoberfest on the field behind the campsite and the noise would have been pretty awful. Our second campsite was not to be found. The co-ordinates on the ACSI site were incorrect and we found ourselves driving round a housing estate, down a no through road and across a supermarket car park. Our third choice was Camping Sud a small and virtually empty Dutch run campsite. When we arrived we were offered five pitches 46 to 50 and we picked one that had ... read more

Hi everyone One of the highlights of the summer occurred two weeks ago, when I took a day trip, along with Saman, Matt and Jenna over the channel to Flanders. And best of all....the ferry was free! Having underwhelming service on the Christmas Ferry out to Lille back in December, we complained and were awarded free, unrestricted ferry tickets for 2014. The day trip turned into a weekend for me, as I left work straight to London, staying at Matt's on Friday night before the early start on Saturday. Leaving at 5:30am we blasted out the #choons as we made our way down to Dover. As the weekend was the first day of the summer holidays it was absolutely packed, and we ended up spending the whole journey across the channel in the restaurant queuing for ... read more

Ypres in Belgium 4 November 2013 We arrived at the camp site in Ypres at 5.00pm in darkness and it was still raining. The camp site was a recommendation from friends Pauline & Ross who had stayed here a week or 2 beforehand. We were very grateful for their advice. As soon as we hooked up to power we put our heater on!!!! One thing we were looking forward to was to see the bugle-playing event, the ”Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing” that happens every day of the week for many years since the 1920s, at 8.00pm. At 7.30pm when I was going to walk to the ceremony the rain started to pelted down. We couldn’t drive our camper out because the boom gate was down and we didn’t have an entry card. So that ... read more

It has been a little while since the last update - primarily due to the hectic pace. We walked pretty much all across Paris over seven days and are now in Ypres, Belgium for a visit to the WW1 battlefields tomorrow. Some of the highlights in Paris included fireworks on Bastille Day at the Eiffel Tower starting at 11pm, visit to the cemetry Pere Lachaisse where many famous people are buried including Chopin, Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf; and to the Pantheon where the greats of France are interred including Victo Hugo, Voltaire, Curies, and Alexander Dumas. The tour to Versailles was good although it was incredibly crowded and felt like we were pushed through a sausage machine. However we did feel it was more interesting that in 1988 mainly due to the fact that we ... read more