Cruise news
Save an extra £75 and get free UK airport lounge access in the Sandals Caribbean sale. Bookings across all luxury all-inclusive resorts must be for at least seven nights and made by midnight on Tuesday using code ‘LASTMIN75’. Valid for travel to June 30.
sandals.co.uk
River cruises might have a reputation for being slow paced but Emerald is speeding things up with its European EmeraldACTIVE programme.
Passengers on the boutique ships can join guided hikes along the Rhine, cycle tours in the South of France or canoe on the Douro in northern
Portugal. Bikes are also available on most ships for independent exploring.
The action continues on board with yoga classes, aqua aerobics sessions in the pool and workouts in the gym. emeraldcruises.co.uk
■■English Holiday Cruises is sailing out of its traditional waterways on the River Severn and Gloucester to the Sharpness Ship Canal and into France.
The family firm has partnered with CroisiEurope for a seven-day summer itinerary aboard boutique MS Deborah on the River Seine and Yonne Paris and Sens. Packages are available from £2,495 per person, with meals, drinks, wi-fi and excursions. river.englishholidaycruises.co.uk
■■The first steel has been cut for the second ship in Royal Caribbean’s revolutionary Icon Class.
The soon-to-be-named ship – being built at the Meyer Turku shipyard in Turku, Finland – will set sail in 2025, following the debut of Icon of the Seas in January. royalcaribbean.com
Bag a
30% discount on spring getaways ranging from a weekend to a month with James Villas. Book by March 13 for departures up to April 30 for
destinations including Cyprus, Algarve, Majorca, Canary Islands and Greece. Valid for new bookings only, flights extra.
jamesvillas.co.uk
experience taught Jesse, 13 , who’s studying the history of both world wars, more about the horrors of war than all the battlefields and war graves on our tour of Hauts-de-France put together.
Like with many Brits, Northern France had been somewhere we had previously just passed through on the way to the Alps. But all those signs off the autoroute – Amiens, Arras, Saint Omer – were now stops on our mum-and-daughter road trip…
Day 1 Calais Amiens
We caught the early shuttle to France on the first day of autumn half term, but then so did everyone else, which meant delays and eating our packed lunch before 10am out of boredom.
This meant a rush at the other end to meet our guide before it got dark in Amiens, the capital of the Somme department of Hauts-de-France.
But surprisingly, the vast interior of the pretty medieval town’s Notre Dame cathedral was so bright, we needed sunglasses (cathedrale-amiens.fr/en, free entrance).
It was a miracle that shelling barely touched the stunning Gothic building during the war, and Amiens grew wealthy from Allied troops on leave spending their cash in the busy cafes and bars.
We also stopped to try the local Picardy delicacy, almond macarons, at 150-year-old family-owned shop Jean Trogneux (trogneux.fr) in town. It’s fair to say they taste better than they look – like belly buttons.
We stayed in a bright and functional Ibis hotel which was very central and next door to the train station.
And in the evening, we walked along the fairylit canal before stopping at Le Quai (restaurant-lequai.fr) for a
Picardy speciality of ficelle – pancakes filled with ham, cheese, mushrooms and lashings of cream.
Don’t forget to bring your heartburn tablets.
who died brutally in the trenches and shell-holes, which have been preserved.
We cheered ourselves up with lunch at La Basilique in Albert (charminghotelsomme.com) where I had local eel, much to the teen’s horror, before driving on to Arras.
I dropped her off at the Mercure Hotel while I visited the CWGC visitor centre (cwgc.org/ visit-us/ the-cwgc experience, free) to learn about their work to ensure our 23,000 sites of war dead are properly honoured in 150 countries.
It was a rewarding but tough day, and when we had dinner at L’Entre Nous in Arras I felt the need to sink most of my bottle of vin rouge, which the annoying teenager helpfully pointed out more than once. – except she’d have to sit among the war dead at Neuville-St Vaast, the largest German cemetery in France.
The white Portland stone headstones of the British boast well-tended gardens, while the cheap concrete crosses of the French point to a financially-ruined country.
But I found the German cemetery the saddest. Four names to each iron cross, some of them Jewish, in a cemetery that was empty and silent except for the wind in the trees.
We were then back in the car for an hour’s drive to La Coupole
(lacoupole
-france.com,
£9.20 adult/£7.90 child) to visit
Hitler’s secret bunker on the outskirts of Saint Omer, where he launched V2 rockets at London.
It looked like a James Bond villain’s hideout, but inside, the icy-cold feeling of a place built on misery and human suffering was palpable.
Hot showers and a bit of luxury at the four-star Mercure warmed us up, and the teenager even tried wine for the first time with her dinner at Les Frangins ( frangins.fr/category/ restaurant-saint-omer) but declared it “rank”.
Day 4 Saint Omer Boulogne-Sur-Mer
6
6 Calais I was a teenager the last time I visited
Boulogne in the 1980s and spent all my pocket money on bottles of Orangina, which weren’t available in the UK yet.
This time I was taking my own spotty youth to the biggest aquarium in Europe, Nausicaa (nausicaa.co.uk, £24.60 adult/£18.90 child), which made a nice change from war cemeteries for her.
I’m not normally a fan of zoos but the cathedral-sized tank full of graceful manta rays and sharks was worth the pricey entrance ticket alone.
It was also half term in France, and the human exhibits of small, shouty French children eventually began to grate, so we headed to get our train back to Blighty. You can ride a dragon at the seafront of Calais while waiting for your ferry or train (compagniedudragon.com), but we decided to ransack the giant Carrefour supermarket instead.
We also spent quite a lot of time going round and round le spaghetti junction because my GPS kept thinking we were freight. Which I suppose we were, given the amount of vin plonked in the boot…