{"id":284,"date":"2016-09-07T10:56:55","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T09:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/?p=284"},"modified":"2016-09-23T06:20:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T05:20:18","slug":"27-dunkirk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/2016\/09\/07\/27-dunkirk\/","title":{"rendered":"(27) Dunkirk"},"content":{"rendered":"

We left Amsterdam in the pouring rain. \u00a0Heaviest on our holiday by far,so glad it wasn’t yesterday. \u00a0We were driving about 400km today through Belgium. \u00a0 We stop at Antwerp, didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing but we parked at what we thought was close to the cente of the city. \u00a0It was all very quiet remembering it was Sunday, stop at a cafe for a coffee and a bun. \u00a0We weren’t the only male\/female couple there but there was a strong influence of male\/male including the staff. \u00a0Headed back to the car to discover we were in the middle of the red light area where there was some very interesting window shopping and no females strolling. \u00a0We loitered there for a bit before continuing our journey. \u00a0Stopped off at Bruge for a bit before heading for Dunkirk just over the Belgium border. \u00a0Just before the border we got pushed off the motorway to go around a roundabout before going back on. \u00a0There were a couple of policemen standing on the roundabout scrutinising us. \u00a0We had a little trouble locating our Airbnb lodgings as we were having trouble getting the correct address in and mixing up towns with areas. \u00a0If you get to use a GPS in France you will probably understand. \u00a0A really nice host, Sophia and Conrad and two very well behaved boys, Soren (5) and Abel (2) in a lovely house in Grande-Snythe. \u00a0Settled in and went to the Commercial Centre and had a meal at Flunch, we had a surprisingly good steak, chips and peas for 10 euro each and for another 10 euro we had a small bottle of red wine each and shared cheese and bread. \u00a0All very good.<\/p>\n

Monday – no rush today we got up late and lazed around. \u00a0I needed to go to the bank and ended up going back across into Belgium to get the bank I wanted. \u00a0We then just drove into the country along country lanes and passed small villages and corn fields and such before heading back to Dunkirk to the Museum. \u00a0We spent a couple of hours wandering around there. \u00a0It was very interesting and makes you realise what our forefathers went through for us. \u00a0In fact it was probably even a lot worse than we even think if you’d had to live through it. \u00a0Went for a stroll along the beach, a big sandy beach a bit like the Kapiti coast, wind blown. \"dunkirk-m\"<\/a>\u00a0We \u00a0then went into town, it was starting to drizzle and the city looked pretty tired compared to some of the places we had seen (so did Antwerp from what we saw). \u00a0I got a hair cut at a ladies salon for 13 euro, \u00a0I thought it was a reasonable one considering nobody spoke English. \u00a0We went back to an electronics and whiteware shop at the Commercial Centre in Grande-Snythe that wasn’t open on Sunday. \u00a0A really fantastic selection of stuff much of which I hadn’t seen before. \u00a0After checking out many places we went back to Flunch for tea and wasn’t happy to find the steak we had had the night before wasn’t on the Monday menu, grrrrr but we ate there anyway even though it wasn’t as nice. \u00a0Like Doug says you shouldn’t go back to a restaurant a second time. \u00a0We also explored the supermarket which was the biggest I had ever been in. \u00a0We went back to our hosts and had a beer and talked.<\/p>\n

Tuesday and we are heading for Mont Saint Michel about 500km away, our biggest days driving. \u00a0Stopped along the motorway for a coffee, muffin and wee wee. \u00a0It was great driving with not a lot of traffic, a lot of it at 130km\/h on toll roads. I think we paid about 16 euros in tolls. \u00a0We stopped at Rouen and went for a stroll, \u00a0looked around the Cathedral which was being renovated, It was huge and we spent a reasonable amount of time there before having a coffee and back on the road. \u00a0We arrived at our host in Mont Saint Michel around 5:30, off loaded and went out to look around and find somewhere to eat. \u00a0It was a really nice area, rural and narrow quite roads. \u00a0We went out towards the monastery and suddenly struck civilisation. \u00a0It looked like the visit was going to be very commercial. \u00a0Found this nice little pub for dinner, it was quaint, especially when a mob of sheep came past our window. \u00a0I was able to get a photo of the sheep and Mont Saint Michel in the background. \u00a0It was back to our BnB, a catch up with our host, and another guest, Paul from Washington DC who had biked down from Amsterdam and heading for Paris. \u00a0Very impressive as he only had a small back pack. \u00a0Michele our host spoke almost no English so it was good to have Paul who seemed to know quite a bit of French to translate.<\/p>\n

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We left Amsterdam in the pouring rain. \u00a0Heaviest on our holiday by far,so glad it wasn’t yesterday. \u00a0We were driving about 400km today through Belgium. \u00a0 We stop at Antwerp, didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing but we parked at what we thought was close to the cente of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holiday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hailes.co.nz\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}