Planning for visiting Vimy Ridge

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When we checked our email today, we had heard back from the family of Joshua's friend Zack Schaller, who lives in Switzerland. His father, Steve, said that we might be able to arrange to get together as they are just across the border from France in Switzerland, not far from Evy's friend Sandy where we are heading next.

Steve also shared some details of a trip that they had made which included going to Vimy Ridge, the WWI battle field where so many Canadians had died. At first, we thought it sounded like the battle field was close to the town of Verdun, and we considered going there after our next near Strasbourg. After some research though, we realized that it was in fact closer to the town of Arras which is North of Paris in the direction that we would go for London. After emailing our Paris apartment about changing dates, we quickly emailed back after discovering our mistake and stuck with the original plan.

After discovering that we in fact had to go to the town of Arras to be close to Vimy ridge, we did some more research on the internet and found out a good site for information about visiting the memorial and battle fields (the operation is, oddly enough, run by Parks Canada) as well as finding a hostel in Arras that can be our back up if we don't find anything better for accommodation. With no luck finding English language guide books here, we bought and downloaded a chapter on Northern France from the Lonely Planet guide book site.

Later in the morning, we took a trip to the tourist office to find out how to use the public transit to get both to the soccer game tomorrow night (Joshua and I) as well as the train station on Sunday morning. Apparently, there is some sort of rotating transit strike on (a common thing, according to Evy) and they may or may not slow down our trip to the station Sunday. Not wanting to take a chance, we picked up the phone number for the taxi as well.

After the tourist office, we did some shopping and then went to the train office, only to find it closed (2 -4). We headed home to join the kids for lunch and then spent the afternoon doing school work.

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