Bonjour tout le monde! Today is the final full day on the road, last stop in France before going through the channel tunnel and heading back to Wales.
We were up a little hungover but by about 10:30 we were back on the road. Once again the drive up was quite uneventful being just dry farm fields as far as the eye can see.
On this drive we had a detour that took us about an hour out to Morval, why there? Well this was a chance to go and see the grave of my great grandfather who fought in WW1 and died in August of 1918 to go pay my respects, I asked this of Clive who happily obliged when we coordinated this leg; in fact he went down here with a group of others from my family in September last year. I unfortunately had to pass on it because of it being too close to my leaving day for this trip. So great to get to go this time.
We soon arrived in the Somme Valley and drove toward Morval. Morval is a tiny village that would have been blown to bits in the war. It’s surreal to think about it actually and if you visited in Winter when the fields are plowed you would get a way better appreciation for the nightmare it must have been living in the trenches.
My Great Grandfather’s grave is in Morval and it’s a tiny cemetery you wouldn’t know was there if you weren’t looking for it. It is a tiny place hidden in plain sight. We soon got there and paid our respects. After this we stopped at another grave site where over 3000 men are buried, many of which we do not know the names of. It’s one thing to see these in pictures and another to visit in person. Sobering stuff and this is still only a small grave site.
After this sobering experience it was another hour to Saint Omer. We did the usual thing of park up and go. Check into the hotel. This Hotel, Clos du Baille is by far the nicest place I’ve stayed in on this entire trip and costed about 5x my typical accommodation budget at £96 for one night, but oh well fk it last one deserve a little luxury, also the cheapest option was like £75 and on the other end of town which just would have been a shlep anyway.
It has a great view of the Cathedral in town and it was an old monks cloister back in the day. Before meeting up with Clive for dinner I had a brief look inside and it was pretty impressive and we’ve seen plenty of cathedrals on this trip!
We head out to one of Clive’s favourite restaurant bars here and have a superb stake dinner and vino de Bordeaux. We keep it sane as we have a somewhat early start for the Euroshuttle tomorrow.
This has been a great way to come home and has been a nice soft landing back in Europe and Blighty. I am probably not going to do a blog on the UK leg of this journey as all it really was, was the typical motorway haul through England in busy traffic till we crossed the bridge back into Wales.
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