Thursday June 20th - 81k ride to Arras. Overcast, misty rain, coldish 15°C to 18°C
Leaving Bray sur Somme in rain
Longueville Cemetery
Pozieres - Aussies remembered
Thiepval Monument
Memorial at Mouquet Farm - The Australians called it Moo Cow Farm
Story of March 1918
British War Memorial Thiepval
British War Museum Thiepval
Morning misty rain, late afternoon sunshine and some of the best war museums that explained World War 1 to Dummies like us. We cycled from Bray sur Somme around some of the more notable WW1 battlefields of Longueville, Pozieres and Thiepval before heading north towards Arras.
It's raining - again. After packing, Donna, Milton, Ian and myself walk down to breakfast to the sun room overlooking the Somme - but there's no sun - just misty rain. Three cups of coffee, two croissants and a hunk of French bread each and we're ready to hit the road. We say good bye to Donna and Milton who are cycling east along the Somme River to Amiens to catch the train to Paris, and then to the Pyrenees. We head north towards Longueville. It's misty mizzling rain, but not cold. I'm wearing a red rain jacket so travel behind Ian to be more visible to passing motorists and trucks, but it's really not necessary. They all swing about two metres wide, except for the tourists from Australia who do what they do in Australia - miss you by two inches.
The Longueville Monument and Cemetery is mostly for New Zealanders and South Africans. It just adds to the enormity of WW1. Every Cemetery we have passed is manicured to the extreme without a blade of grass out of place and there's always 3-4 workers in each cemetery - with more than a thousand war cemeteries, that's probably about 5,000 full time workers maintaining history for us.
Next stop is Le Sars. Where's that? I don't know. We missed a turn and got lost in the mist and had to travel down a busy A highway to Pozieres. But strangely I feel safer than in Oz. The people of Pozieres lovingly remember the Australians with reminders all over the village. In fact all over Northern France in particular, people fly the Australian flag.
Having spent an extra hour cycling in circles in teh misty rain, we arrive in Pozieres at midday in time for a very late morning coffee. The sun has finally broken through and there's all of a sudden lots of Australians floating around the cemeteries and memorials. Riding on to Mouquet Farm, another strategic location, and known as Moo Cow Farm by the diggers in WW!, we meet more Australians doing the Memorial circuit. This part of the Somme has many tourists.
We're deciding whether or not to stop or bypass Thiepval, the British Museum and Memorial, when we see busloads of tourists arriving and realise it must be special. And it is. The huge Thiepval Monument is a memorial to the British troops missing in the Somme. And the War Museum is the best we have visited so far with a full and simple explanation of how World War 1 started and progressed.
Basically one lone person started the war. While riding in the motorcade through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June, Franz Ferdinand (heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire) and his wife Sophie were shot and killed by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb. The assassination provided Austria-Hungary with an excuse to take action against Serbia. Germany sided with Austria, Russia sided with Serbia and France, who had a treaty with Russia, sided with them. England, didn't want Germans on their doorstep so they sided with France and Australia was committed to help the motherland and so on and son on and the result is World War 1.
Time to leave the museum and cycle North East along the D9 through villages spaced every 4 to 5k. It makes for such a nice ride with farmland interspersed with cute villages. We arrive in Brache St Vaast expecting to find a B and B or Chambre D'hote but nothing. It's now 5.30. On a bit further until we pass through Fresnes-Les-Montauban and spy a hotel off in the distance in the middle of nowhere and decide to see if theres a vacancy. Yes, there is. But the room is about a 15 minute walk to the other end of the complex. We find out that it's really conference centre called L'Aquarium, Hotel Inter Tour, and it's sandwiched between a main highway and a TGV (Superfast French Train) Line. In no time we have washed and hung it out the window.
The restaurant looked nice and after a shower we're sitting down looking forward to a beer and grilled lamb. Forty five minutes later and no waiter comes near us - not even for a drink - Ian's tongue is lolling for a beer. So we slide out of the restaurant, order a carafe of wine from the bar, sneak it upstairs and sit down in our room with the left overs from lunch for dinner - one round of camembert cheese, one avocado, a few macadamia nuts, one tomato and that's it. Better than waiting another hour. All washed down with a rose.
Wind Farms near Thiepval