This morning, we were all up at 6am so that my youngest brother could be put on
the school coach for a trip to the
battlefields of
Flanders for his
GCSE
history course. Then the remaining three of us - Mum, Dad and me - were off to
our own
French break. We took the
M25 and the
M20 to
Folkestone to get
the '
le Shuttle'
Channel Tunnel car-carrier to
Calais. We had lunch at a
favourite northern French location - the little hilltop town of
Cassel.
Founded by the
Romans and surrounded by dead straight roads across the
Flanders plain, it's got a
windmill and defensive walls several centuries old.
From there we headed on eastward to
St Amand-les-Eaux, by the
Belgian
border, which is a spa town where
Napoleon Bonaparte came to take the waters
in
1805. The sight to see here is the free-standing
west front of an
otherwise demolished
Rococo church. It's truly hideous, and houses an
unexceptional museum of local
pottery. While looking for the entrance, I
succeeded in getting
crapped on by one of the shabby pigeons that make the
towers their home.
Swiftly onward.
We followed the motorway from St Amand to
Maubeuge, from where we cut across
the
Namur district of
Belgium - very pleasant and rural. Our route brought
us down to the town of
Givet, which is on the end of a finger of French
territory extending northward into Belgium along the valley of the river
Meuse (or
Maas). A huge fortress (not open to the public) overlooks the
valley there. We headed up the river, past a large
nuclear power plant, to
Vireux-Wallerand, where we crossed the river and headed across country,
through the French
Ardennes, to
Monthermé, where we crossed
the river again, and went over a pass overlooking the
crags known as '
The Four
Sons of Aymon' to
Charleville-Mezières, and down
to
Bazeilles, close to
Sedan, where we would be staying. Bazeilles is
notable, in that in the
battle of Sedan in
1870, it was there, in a
farmstead now known as '
The House of the Last Cartridge', that a group of
French
marines, outfaced by the
German army, vowed to fight to the very last
bullet.
The hotel dinner was good, and we went to bed pretty exhausted.
Forward!