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Trip Start Jun 10, 2007 Previous
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  London, United Kingdom
Sunday, November 4, 2007

Hey all,

welcome to the last installment of van tour. Well, Paula, Digger, Zeke, Jen, Hamish and Katie left to catch their respective ferries while Suse, Astro, Laila, Bambam and ourselves decided to take in a French Chateau Chenonceaux. However, Bambam ran into a bit of van trouble (something to do with a metal thing connected to the wheel something or rather thingy whatsit) so we didn't get to see the Chateau until the next day. Chateau Chenonceaux just outside of Tours was the home of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Henri II (King of France). When King Henri died, his wife Queen Catherine de Medicis ordered Diane to give back the chateau to her, and gave Diane the chateau of Chaumont-sur-Loire in exchange. See, women do know how to share. The chateau was amazing, very ornate, complete with guard tower, two gardens, a number of bedrooms (they were a pretty saucy lot), a gallery running from one side of the river to the other and a maze.

After wandering around the chateau for a few hours, we left Suse and Astro (we had an earlier ferry than they) and continued on to Amiens with Laila and Bambam to check out some of the World War 1 sites and learn a bit about the Battle of Sommes. Visited the NZ memorial in Longueval and the Caterpillar Valley Cemetery where we found the headstone of the Unkown Soldier - awesome! We also visited the Lochnager Crater which, along with 16 other sites, was blown up at 0730 on 1 July 1916. At the time it measured 300ft across and 90ft feet I but can't remember the measurements to date. Also managed to find the Aussie Memorial for Laila as I think she might have been a bit kiwi'd out. Stayed in a McD's carpark that night with free internet - woohoo!

The next day we went to the visit the Amien war museum which was really well put together. It was nice to see that they had a section devoted to the animals in the war as well. Unfortunately we only had a few hours there as we decided to get in one more country and shot up into Belgium to Lepen for some more World War 1 sight seeing in Flanders feilds.  We drove through the Menin Gate Memorial in Lepen (previously known as Ypres) where inside stands the Hall of Memory with the names of 54,000 soldiers inscribed upon it.

We also visited the Tyne Cot Cemetery, the resting place of nearly 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers, making it the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world.  A really beautiful cemetery, white pillars, monuments all over the place. That morning they'd actually had a ceremony in remeberance of Anzac with a number of very important people attending and guess who's name tag we managed to take as a souveneir - the Honourable Helen Clarke's! Awesome. But that met a loud ending with one of Bambam's firecrackers.

After that, we headed back to France, Calais and said our goodbyes to Bambam and Leila who were catching an earlier ferry. Our ferry wasn't until later that night but we managed to get an earlier one despite a few hardcore questions from passport control (Cy looked dodgy, I think it was the long hair). They also took my tan off me because apparently it's an illegal product in the UK - it has to come out of a bottle. So, before you could say 'do ya know what I mean, yeah' we were back in the UK. We drove back to London that night and parked up outside the old flat for a well deserved nights' sleep.

And that's it, end of van tour. 20000 Km's, 4 months, over 15 countries, 2 nights in hotels (bliss!), 2 nights in a tent and the rest in our trusty stead the kranken wagen. Hope you all enjoyed the stories, those we could tell in public anyway! Thanks again to the Zamparini family for putting up with us that awesome week in Verona.

Next stop - Canada! God help them.

Ants & Cy

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