Upon leaving Paris, we picked up a rental car and drove to Northern France, to visit some of the World War I battlefields. We focused on the trenches around the Somme battlefields, since this is home to both the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge and the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont Hamel. In addition to their status as official memorials, both Vimy and Beaumont Hamel provide a vivid picture of how the trenches would have looked during battle. At Vimy, the trenches have been reconstructed with concrete "sandbags", while at Beaumont Hamel, they have been allowed to grow grassy green,
View from our window: Courcelles-au-Bois, Hauts-de-France, France, 9:19 pm, 10 June 2023
Like Rome, our visit to Paris felt far too short to take in everything the city has to offer — all the more so because we had a number of old friends now living in the city. In just five days and six nights, we were trying to cram in a month's worth of social visits and some of the world's most-visited tourist attractions and some time to just soak up the city and its atmosphere. We could have spent a month. In terms of attractions, we braved the crowds at the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. For both, we
View from our window: Paris, France, 10:39 am, 04 June 2023 Conveniently located across the streets from the North Korean embassy
On a gorgeous Friday just before a long weekend and school holiday, we took advantage of the relative peace and quiet to see some sights around Poole Harbour. Our first stop was at the the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a charitable organisation which provides most of the offshore rescue services for Britain and Ireland. Poole is the headquarters of the RNLI, and also hosts the training facilities, around which we took a tour. We got to see all the various classes of lifeboat, the wave pool that can simulate a full blown storm for practicing how to deal with a
The Historic Dockyards in Portsmouth are best thought of as a kind of British naval history theme park. There are half a dozen ships of different vintages and states of repair, ranging from the half-hulk of Henry VIII's Mary Rose, all the way up to a submarine that was running missions in the Cold War. It's huge. We spent two days exploring the dockyard's multiple museums, and could easily have spent a third. The highlight was probably the Mary Rose exhibit, which was opened in 2016, 33 years after the ship was retrieved from the bottom of the sea. The
View from our window: Portsmouth, United Kingdom. 8:10am, 25 May 2023.
View from our window: Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom. 8:56am, 24 May 2023.
The Old Harry Rocks are an outcropping of white cliffs in Studland Bay in Dorset. We walked from Knole Beach all the way out to the rocks and then across to Swanage. The cliffs are spectacular — no guardrails here! Just a sheer drop down to the ocean and rocks below. Old Harry Rocks Looking down over the sheer cliff face Thankfully, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution trains Britain's lifeboat crews off the coast Swanage and Poole, so if worst came to worst they were there in their speedboats to fish us out. Looking across to Swanage
There are some 2,000 miles of navigable canals in England and Wales, mostly dating from the early 19th century, when they were an essential way to move people and goods around the country. Nowadays, the network of canals, locks, tunnels, and bridges is mainly used by pleasure boaters and holiday-makers. All around England, you can find marinas that will rent you a narrowboat for a week. With what seems like very cursory instruction on how to operate the locks and your boat, they send you off in a 17-ton, 6-foot 10-inch wide hunk of steel. Mazel tov! We set off from