In the late afternoon we left Bath and drove the hour or so to Cardiff, on the way crossing the Bristol Channel on the 'second Severn crossing' bridge - it is very long! And it cost £6! Once we settled into our very nice B&B we had an enjoyable pub dinner (pubs in the UK seem to have a much higher standard of meal than what we're used to) and then went for a drive around Cardiff that included the bay area and looking westward across the Bristol Channel out ...

Good things that happened on our way to Bath: - it was sunny when we left Dover - we picked up our hire car no probs - a red Hyundai i30 - we drove to Canterbury in about 40 mins - we JUST avoided a parking ticket by pleading that we were tourists - we had the best coffee since we've been on holidays, and with the best holiday sandwiches so far - we got to Bath safely - we had one of the best 'pub' meals we've ever had at the 'Bear' Hotel in Bath - the B ...

We opened our eyes and hotel curtains to a glorious day in Lille so all was looking good for the 90 minute train trip to Calais on the Inter-City train and the Channel Ferry crossing. Having made sure we stamped our train ticket to avoid a fine, we settled in and we must have looked like we were locals as we even had a French youth ask us for directions. We enjoyed the trip again across mostly flat country and having reached Calais set about finding an Internet c...

We set off early by train from Ieper to Lille, a trip of an hour and 10 minutes with one station change (we've now developed a strategy for loading/unloading our bags from the ridiculously high trains - or is it the ridiculously low platforms). There are two train stations at Lille, France - one the local station called Lille Flandres and the other is the Lille Eurostar Terminal. We traversed from one to the other with no problems and found our Back Roads tour at...

10 May - Ieper in Belgium (also known as Ypres - in French we think) After another wet start to the day, we left Amsterdam Central station mid-morning and traveling about three hours to our first change at Mechelin (south of Antwerp in Belgium) then another 90 minutes to Kortrijk where having four minutes to change platforms we saw our train leaving - we caught the next one an hour later then did the last 30 minutes to Ieper (or Ypres - both Dutch and French are...