Homeward Bound: Fun & Games at the Ferry Terminal

Saturday 23 – Wednesday 27 April 2022

We did decide to wander back into Arras and have a look at the market on Saturday morning. It was huge!

After a good wander round, we returned to SOK and headed off towards Souchez, a few kilometres to the North of Arras. There’s a museum there called “Memorial 14-18” that we wanted to visit last time we were in Souchez but couldn’t as it was a Bank Holiday and the museum was closed….

This time, the museum was only closed from 1 to 2pm for lunch, so we headed up the hill to Notre Dame de Lorette for our own lunch while we were waiting:

Notre Dame de Lorette is the largest French military cemetery in the World. After WW1, the French chose to collect together their dead into huge “statement” cemeteries, whereas the British preferred to leave their buried close to where they had fallen.

Eagle-eyed after our visit to the CWGC Experience the previous day, Mark immediately commented “that hedge would never do for the CWGC” and “look at the state of that edging”.

We expected to spend an hour or so in the Memorial 14-18 museum, but we were there for well over two hours.

The museum tells the story of the War in this region of France. Basically, as you’d expect it’s a story of death and destruction on a massive scale. The black dots on the map below are villages and towns that were completely destroyed. The area coloured red was “totally devastated”.

It’s really well done, combining information panels with lots and lots of photographs and TV screens showing five minute videos put together using rare footage from the War.

There was SO much to look at, and we discovered all kinds of interesting little bits and pieces that tied into things we already knew about and were interested in and places that we’d been. I’ve picked out a couple of examples, just to give an idea.

This is Arras, where we’d been that morning. You can see the square where the market is held on the right hand side of the photo:

This is Rudyard Kipling at the inauguration of the Loos Memorial in 1930:

The Loos Memorial is a huge memorial wall surrounding Dud Corner Cemetery, on which are recorded the names of over 20,000 officers and men killed in the area whose bodies were not recovered.

Kipling’s only son was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915 and his name was one of those recorded on the Loos Memorial. As was my great grandad’s, killed in near Vimy in 1916.

There were so many other interesting bits and pieces in the 14-18 Memorial that we’ll have to go back and look through it again sometime.

Leaving the museum in the late afternoon, we had an hour or so’s drive up to Saint-Omer, where we needed to hit the Auchan supermarket for some French supplies to take home and also fill up with diesel and LPG. SOK is now full of beer, as usual at this stage in a trip.

As you can see, Mark is fully embracing the “buy local” message!

Overnight: Haut-Pont Motorhome Aire, St Omer (23 April)

Not our best choice of motorhome aire this trip. It looked OK on the photos:

The price of €5 was fine. Less good was the proximity of a railway line with what must’ve been freight trains barrelling through intermittently for much of the night. We were (as we thought) handily positioned on the main road in the direction we wanted to go the next day, but it turned out that there was a 3 metre high bridge just at the exit from the aire which we didn’t dare attempt, resulting in a much lengthier (but interesting) tour of the country lanes…

We arrived eventually in Dunkirk and parked up at the “Museum Dunkerque 1940 Operation Dynamo”.

This museum is housed in old casemates dating back to the late 19th century.

Again, although we were familiar with the general gist of the story, we found lots of interesting bits and bobs to look at.

We visited on the day of the second round of the French Presidential Election. This little voting form from 1938 therefore caught our eye – Hitler asking the people to vote on whether they agreed with the annexation of Austria. We thought he could’ve made the “nein” circle even smaller…

A turret from a Renault tank, looking very much like some kind of early R2D2. We didn’t know that Renault made tanks:

We both liked this Renault car in the section talking about the exodus of civilians in 1940:

Finally, a leaflet dropped by the Luftwaffe over the Dunkirk area. Interesting to see the slightly different messages addressed to the French and the English soldiers:

We drove back out of Dunkirk to the nearby town of Bergues, where we spent our first night after getting the ferry from Dover at the end of last month. We do like the aire here:

Overnight: Bergues (24 April 2022)

Our task for Sunday evening was planning our route home. We needed places to visit on Tuesday and Wednesday, plus somewhere to stay on Tuesday night.

Sorting out places to visit was easy. Mark picked Down House, the home of Charles Darwin. I had Coughton Court on my list as it came up in a book on the Gunpowder Plot that I’d read a couple of months back.

Finding a campsite for Tuesday night proved more problematic.

There were a few Caravan Club sites to choose from near our route. There seemed to be good availability, but they all wanted in the region of £32 for a one night stay. Hmmm…. It seems that prices have shot up for club sites as well as everything else.

We decided to look at CLs in the hope of a more budget-friendly option. I rang one but they were closed as they were having electrical work done. Others had drastically put their prices up between the printing of the Caravan Club book and the price now showing online on the website. £20 to park on a farmer’s field without electricity? A couple of sites we looked at had a “minimum two nights” policy, which ruled us out.

Eventually, Mark said “why don’t we just go to Brill Windmill”. Job done, we put the books away.

Monday morning arrived all too soon: time to start heading home.

We’d booked a 12 noon ferry from Dunkirk to Dover, so had plenty of time in the morning to trundle back to Dunkirk and get checked in with plenty of time to spare.

It’s a good job that we did. When we pulled up in our loading lane after going through all the various check-in, passport checks, and customs checks, I checked our passports to find that we hadn’t been given exit stamps. Ho hum. I mulled it over for 5 minutes, had a look online to check that we really should have received exit stamps, then decided we really didn’t need the potential hassle when we try to re-enter the Schengen zone at the end of June (at which point our passports would look as though we had already overstayed our 90 days. You’d think border guards would accept other evidence, but this story indicates that you can’t necessarily rely on common sense prevailing).

So off I marched…. back past two sets of customs checks (we have no idea why there were two separate sets of people, both with French accents, needing to check inside the very same cupboards in SOK; thankfully the UK customs folk at Dover decided not to bother), the UK border police (who confirmed that it’s the French who should’ve stamped out passports), all the way back to the only non-customs French person we’d come across on the way in (who had taken a good look at our passports).

I had a very circular conversation with this young French lad (general gist: I don’t stamp passports. OK, but someone needs to stamp our passports. Who do I ask? I don’t stamp passports…..). Eventually, his (female) colleague in the booth next to him started shouting something, which turned out to be that it’s the French Police who stamp the passports.

The obvious next question was: Where are the French police? Another booth was pointed out. This had seemed completely abandoned when we came in: no signs of life and a barrier that just opened as you drove up to it.

So off I marched to that (still abandoned-looking) booth and knocked on the window. Sure enough, a waft of very toasty warm air hit me as the window opened to reveal a French policeman sitting inside. So he’d been toasting his toes in comfort in his little booth and just pressing the button to open the barrier for vehicles without revealing his presence or, indeed, looking at or stamping any passports?

I asked him to stamp our passports and he cheerfully obliged (without checking that either passport was mine or asking where Mark was). After that, I marched all the way back past the UK police and the customs sheds without anyone batting an eyelid, thinking that there are some things you can get away with as a middle-aged white woman that others might have more difficulty doing…..

We had a good crossing to Dover with DFDS, then drove the short distance up the coast to Walmer Castle.

Walmer Castle is one of the coastal forts built by Henry VIII in 1539-40. It’s to a very attractive design, with a circular central keep surrounded by four circular bastions.

Unlike other coastal forts of its type, this one became a luxurious residence in the 18th century when the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports decided to move his official residence from Dover Castle to Walmer Castle.

Later Lord Wardens who have had use of the castle include William Pitt the Younger, the Duke of Wellington, and the Queen Mother.

Walmer Castle from the Queen Mother’s garden:

Photography was not allowed inside the castle, but we got information about the castle and two of the Lord Wardens (Pitt and Wellington) We saw the room in which Wellington died in 1852 (and the chair he was sitting in when he died). We had no idea that Wellington died here before we visited; it’s funny how people “re-occur” on trips. In this case, we’d only just visited the Battle of Waterloo site and then there he was again, death mask and all…..

We were told that one particular sitting room was the favourite of the Queen Mother as she could let her dogs out from there straight onto the enclosed bastion outside.

I bet the corgis made good use of those gun carriages…..

Overnight: Canterbury New Dover Road Park & Ride (25 April)

We spent Monday night back at the fabulous aire in Canterbury.

Tuesday took us to Down House. Darwin apparently described the house as ugly when he first moved in, though he didn’t improve matters by tacking bits on to accommodate his growing family.

He lived at Down House for 40 years, so it must’ve grown on him.

Again, no photography was allowed inside as the house has lots of artefacts on display that belong to various descendants of Charles Darwin, so apparently there would be “copyright issues”.

The exhibition inside the house about Charles Darwin (his work and his family life) was interesting, and we could also look at the gardens and greenhouse where he conducted some of his experiments.

From Down House, we continued round the M25 and up the M40 to Buckinghamshire and Brill Windmill.

Overnight: Brill Windmill (26 April)

We’ve stayed at Brill Windmill twice in the past. It’s a great little spot; technically wild camping but no-one seems to bat an eyelid and it always gets good reviews online.

When we arrived this time, we discovered that Brill Windmill is poorly. One sail was damaged in a storm in October 2021 (see photo below), then it was discovered that one of the other sails has rot in it and needs repairs.

Awww, poor windmill.

A notice attached to a bench told us about the problem and invited donations towards the estimated £20,000 cost of specialist repairs. Right-o. It would’ve been cheaper to have spent the night at the Caravan Club! Not to worry, though. Handing money over to a poorly windmill is a pretty painless experience compared to handing money over with that irritating feeling of being overcharged…..

We had a good journey home on Wednesday, stopping off to visit Coughton Court just South of Birmingham.

Coughton Court was incredibly busy, which did mean that the house was crowded and we didn’t really get the best look round.

There was a nice little exhibition in the courtyard about the Gunpowder Plot and the main characters involved. Essentially, the link to Coughton Court is that a group of plotters showed up here whilst on the run after the discovery of the plot. One of their number had recently rented the place to use as a local base. The owners, the Throckmorton family, were a well-known family of Catholic recusants and related to some of the plotters (two of the plotters, including the ringleader, had mothers who were Throckmortons of Coughton Court). The story is spiced up by the presence of Jesuit priests (who were of course banned at the time so had to hide away in cunningly devised “priest holes” whenever the authorities came to call).

We’ve been unlucky with the few visits we’ve made to National Trust properties in the last couple of years. Once again, there were issues due to a last minute shortage of volunteers (we made sure not to breathe in anywhere near those volunteers who were still standing). The tower room was closed, so we didn’t see the Coughton Court priest hole. Not to worry; we’ll just have to pop back sometime and have another look at the rest of the house too.

Then is was back home to a van full of washing and a garden full of weeds…. We’ve got three weeks to sort it all out before we’re off to the Isle of Man.