DAY ONE: Somme Tour
The tour starts at Amiens station at 9.00am.
From there we will visit the 1918 battlefields, starting with Villers-Bretonneux where we will pay our respects at the imposing Australian Memorial which commemorates nearly 11.000 Australian soldiers who died in France and have no known grave. We will then visit a German cemetery on the way to Albert, where we will have a break for lunch.
In the afternoon we will visit the 1916 battlefields : the impressive Lochnagar mine crater, a huge mine which was blown up on the 1st of July 1916, Pozières, and the Thiepval memorial to the Missing. The names of 72000 missing British and South African soldiers who died in the Somme before March 1918 are commemorated on this overwhelming monument. We will finally visit the Canadian Historic Site of Beaumont-Hamel and its preserved trenches. The Newfoundland regiment suffered here 90 % casualties on the 1st of July 1916.
After this extremely moving day we will return to Amiens.
Overnight at Amiens
DAY TWO: Somme to Ypres (Belgium)
On the second day we cover the Somme, Artois and French Flanders areas.
The tour starts at Amiens station (or at your hotel) at 9.00am.
We will continue our visit of the Somme battlefields on the way to Arras, and visit the Canadian Memorial at Vimy ridge, where the four Canadian Divisions fought a major battle in April 1917.
We will then continue northwards to Fromelles, visiting VC Corner Memorial and Cemetery, the Cobbers Memorial, and of course the new Fromelles Cemetery, Pheasant Wood, where 250 Australian and Bristish soldiers recently found have been reburied. We will drive towards Ypres and cross the Belgian border in the afternoon.
The tour finishes at about 5.00pm at the hotel of your choice in Ypres, where you can attend the Last Post ceremony at the Menin gate by yourself: it's at 8.00pm every night, for this reason an overnight at Ypres is neccessary.
This Tour finishes at Ypres and doesn't retrun to Amiens