Hello, Yet again the photo is upside down! Not sure why. I am having trouble publishing my blogs after years of it being straight forward. My war tour has finished, with more days of seeing more impressive cemeteries-as in the numbers of dead in them. One German cemetery has 44,000 in it! The losses were horrendous. Yesterday we went to the fairly new memorial of Notre Dame de Lorette which is just for that area of the Somme. It has 579,000 names on it of m...

Hello again. The cold weather has continued and today for our 2.30 am departure it was raining as well. What a pity. There was an attempt to be more organised at the site numbering buses, to stream line pick ups after. It was a shambles and took so long we missed nearly all of the little local town ceremony to say thanks to the Aussies for liberating their town in 1918.I saw nothing of the VB ceremony as inconsiderate people used umbrellas despite being told not ...

Hello from freezing Belgium. It is COLD here. Very sad. I had a long day trip to Amsterdam, lovely green fields on the way with canals everywhere. Didn't see any tulip fields,apparently they are way to the east. We saw very few windmills which nowadays are nearly all houses. We had a tour of the canals, seeing houses,major buildings etc. We then walked through the red light area, with the ladies sitting openly at windows scantily dressed. We were shown the 'c...

Wow what a day. I caught the fast train to Brussels and after some confusion as I came into a different station to the one I had a map for I found the hotel. In the middle of mini Morocco ! Hmmm The hotel room is very ordinary. I set off for the centre which isn't far. All of you who have been here will know what I mean about how historic this place is. It is brimming with 200-400 yr old buildings that are covered in carvings,gargoyles etc. just beautiful. Oh...

Hi folks, Well I made it here safely. Oh what a long flight it was. It was a full flight but the guy in my row at the window was upgraded to business! So the middle guy moved into the window seat leaving a spare middle seat. So I Immediately lay down on it. Got 5 mins sleep on the 13 hr flight! Well, maybe 10 mins. Now I remember why I came for 6 months. To avoid the flight. Sadly my bag weighed 25 kgs and is virtually impossible to carry up/down stairs. I e...