Canal de Jonction

Today we woke up at the crack of dawn to catch the ferry, all successful no checks apart from passport, nobody even checked Maddy! We made it to Calais as it turned to daylight and it was pouring with rain.
We headed to Dunkirk first and had a look around to see the evacuation harbour which they used in Ww2, unfortunately we didn't stay long as the weather was awful, we will be back as they have an app to follow key points surrounding the war.
Next we headed onto Ypres, a significant place during WW1. We went to a memorial and then onto Hill 60 sanctuary woods, here we went to a museum and went around original WW1 trenches, they even have tunnels connecting the trenches together which you can still go down. Felt rather spooky and daunting with Bomb holes surrounding us. We headed onto the Canadian memorial just up the road to have a look. Afterwards, we continued on to Hill 62, which had very close contact fighting during WW1, this involved a huge bomb hole which took 24000 kg of explosives. This was dug underneath enemy lines and the bomb hole itself was ginormous, it's now practically it's own lake. We carried on following the tour which headed through Belgium to the Netherlands border. Today we have been in 4 country's! After getting fuel and some food we headed back to edge of Belgium as the park up in Holland was prohibited for over night staying. After this we made the decision to follow the tour but at leisure as we had missed some places in Belgium, so tomorrow we are back tracking slightly as we got slightly over excited yesterday and heading to Mechelen, hoping we can stay here a few nights and visit the city and also Antwerp and Brussels.

Successful first day and was good to drive the roads and get used to driving on the wrong side, early night as we are both knackered today!Read more