Blogs from Nord-Pas de Calais, France, Europe - page 3

Hiking via WWII bunkers to a monastery The rest of the first week of the vacation we continued our hike in northwestern France. We arrived with the ferry in Calais. The Via Francigena first follows the coast south to Wissant. From there the trail goes east via Guines, Licques and Tournehem-sur-la-Hem to the town Wisques where we right according to plan finished the hike. Most people have never heard of these places. Please don't look at a map where we actually hiked these four days. We did actually hike a decent distance each day. But it looks embarrassingly short if you view it on a map of France. The first day's hike in France was very different from what we did in England. The trail from Calais to Wissant follows the coast and much of it ... read more

Off to France First step, sort the car up which we duly did - then found out the air conditioning didn’t work even though we had just had it regassed. Having spoken to the garage it seems working out the problem and fixing it was likely to cost more than the car was worth, so we decided to take the Astra instead. Shame as I wanted to get to 250,000 miles in the Touran! We caught the ferry from Dover to Dunkirk before heading to Lille where we met an old friend of Sue’s who I cleverly call Anne from France! The following day we went into Lille itself - me hobbling with my knee strapped from playing too much squash too quickly-Doh! Lille is bigger than I thought with a lovely old town. The Cathedral, ... read more

We have been in France before and for an extended period. On that trip we had a vehicle and spent most of our time in the smaller towns, villages and rural areas. A week or so in Paris is our only real experience of a French city. This time we decided to use the trains as our primary means of transport and check out some of the cities. Not too many, though. We prefer to move along slowly and take our time to have a look around. Lille is relatively close to the Netherlands and Belgium and is, therefore, the first French city we would come to. We had a bit to do at our first French railway station. We needed to collect rail tickets bought on-line, and organise and pay for our French Seniors Card. ... read more

The next day we headed from the campsite back towards Carcassonne to try out a track and test out the Wikiloc app, which shows you all the off road tracks that are around. The first track failed as the entrance was now too overgrown to drive down, so we headed off to find another. This one went well, and had some amazing views as well as not being very taxing on the trucks. By 6pm we started looking for a campsite. The first one was nothing but a field, but the next three were all closed down. This was tiring me out, but it did have the benefit of taking us through a bunch of local tunnels, until we finally found an open site next to a river. As we carried on towards Andorra on day ... read more

This is a two day blog as these have been mainly uneventful travelling days. We catch the chunnel tomorrow just before 10am so have had two days driving north to get to our favourite campsite in the area, Chateau Gandspette at Eperlecques, near to St Omer. Decided to do the biggest part of the drive yesterday which took us to Laon. A 6 hour drive which is quite long enough especially for Bob who bruised himself when he slid off the step of Tandy a couple of days ago. This makes sitting a big painful even after his bruise has been anointed with my magic arnica gel. We were sorry to say goodbye to our Stork friends who entertained us so very well on our Turcqheim campsite but have motorhome must travel and it's time to ... read more