Ww1 Flanders To The Somme Mini-Cruise & Tour

Itinerary

5-Day Itinerary

• Day 1

  Regional departure by coach or Door-to-Door service and continue towards Newcastle for our overnight crossing to the Netherlands.

  We have an included meal package on board, including an extensive buffet breakfast and buffet dinner. Afterwards, enjoy the variety of other facilities on board, including bars and live entertainment.

  Meals - Dinner

• Day 2 - Trenches at Hooge – Ypres Battlefields

  We depart our ferry and head for Flanders, arriving for an included late lunch at the Hooge Crater Café and Museum. Located in the heart of the battlefields at Ypres, where over four years a quarter of a million men from British and the Commonwealth died, here we visit the superb private museum, go into a system of specially reconstructed trenches and begin our look at the fighting on the Western Front.

  In the afternoon, we go to Tyne Cot near Passchendaele and visit the largest British Military Cemetery in the world. We learn about the stories of gas warfare in WW1 at the Canadian Memorial at Vancouver Corner – the so-called ‘Brooding Soldier’. At Essex Farm, we see the grave of one of the youngest to die, aged only 15, and some original WW1 bunkers used as a Dressing Station for the wounded. This was also where Canadian Poet John McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ in 1915.

  We then continue to our hotel in central Ypres for two nights, where you will be able to attend the moving Last Post Ceremony at the Menin Gate.

  Meals - Breakfast, Lunch

• Day 3 - Vimy Ridge & the Somme

  We travel down into northern France and visit the impressive Canadian Memorial on the crest of Vimy Ridge. Here, the Canadians took the ridge in April 1917, and we see the memorial, preserved trenches and mine craters.

  Later we visit the Arras Memorial to the Missing, which commemorates over 35,000 with no known grave. After lunch in Arras, we head down to the Somme battlefields of 1916. Here, we go into the preserved trenches in the Newfoundland Park at Beaumont-Hamel, see the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing which commemorates over 72,000 ‘missing of the Somme’, and end at the Lochnagar Mine Crater at La Boisselle, the largest British mine crater surviving on the Western Front.

  Meals - Breakfast

• Day 4 - Flanders Fields

  We return to the Battlefields at Ypres, visiting the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing, driving along the Messines Ridge, seeing the Visitor Centre at Messines itself, and then visiting the preserved mine craters at Hill 60, along with bunkers and shell-holes from WW1.

  In Ypres, we spend time at the Menin Gate to understand its history, hearing some of the stories of those commemorated here. You then have some free time in Ypres before we continue to Ijmuiden for our return overnight crossing to the UK. We have an included meal package on board, including extensive buffets for breakfast and dinner.

  Meals - Breakfast, Dinner

• Day 5

  We disembark this morning and continue our journey home via an en route stop in York.

  Meals - Breakfast

Accommodation

You will stay for two nights in the Novotel Ypres, located in the centre of Ypres just a short walk from Menin Gate.

Overnight ferry accommodation is based on a low-berth inside cabin.