St Omer

A short drive today, just over 250km and it took us around 3 hours including stops. We had breakfast at the hotel and it was surprisingly good value for 5 euros and we set off at 10. We swapped drivers at half way in a service station, this road has almost more british cars than french, at one point every car we could see was british.

We had planned to check into the hotel then head off and look round, we also wanted to go to a large hypermarket that has been recommended to us to stock up on French goodies but we planned to leave that until later so that it was cooler for the dogs to be left in the car.

We found the hotel easily enough, it is right in the town centre and has a small car park. Being aware that there was a small number of spaces relative to the size of the hotel we changed plans and decided that we’d head  to the hypermarket now then get back before 5 and try to get a space before the rush and leave the car in the car park and walk to town for dinner later on.

We checked in and asked the woman for directions to the hypermarket, she told us that it was closed for bank holiday, all the shops are closed along with many restaurants! She said Carrefour was open and we might get what we need there so yet again we’re in carrefour but it was pretty poor and all we bought was a bag of sweets for the journey.

There was a leaflet in the hotel for La Coupole – A bunker that the Nazzis built to launch rockets at London from,,they say that the fate of the 2nd World War could easily have been different should they have succeeded. The Brits became aware of it and bombed it – preventing the completion before the surrender. I was expecting to see the old bunker with rockets in place and lots of information about that but in reality it was a museum about the Nazzis and prisoners of war, interesting enough but not what I expected. Susan stayed outside with the dogs.

This is the bunker, a dome shaped building – rockets arrived by train from Germany and they would have been fired through gaps in the roof.

The remains of the only rocket.

An aerial photo by the Brits in advance of the bombing raids

It was interesting but I only spent an hour in there, I could have spent longer. We drove back to the hotel and managed to get a space in the car park, only 2 left.

We watched one foot in the grave then went for a walk round the town.

The town square, it’s a nice town.

We stumbled across these gardens, they were really nice. Very large and we could let the dos run a bit.

We walked round looking for a restaurant for dinner, we eventually settled on a nice place, the food was good and they allowed dogs – actually the perfect place, the banned smoking but allowed dogs!