Making it to the danger tree | Battle of the Somme motorcycle tour Ride 1 | Arras France
Imagine, all those young soldiers fighting here and well dying here before they even reach the danger tree. Welcome to another QUAZY RIDE and in this ride we are taking you on our ride 1 of the QUAZY RIDES Battle of the Somme tour. And if you like what you see you can do this ride as well because you can download all the information in the e-book and a GPX F from our website for free. The Somme Valley is synonymous for the bloodshed during World War I and the battlefields of the Western Front lie along the river Somme and its tributaries um uh just between of Arras and Amiens South-Southwest of Arras and in this ride we will be touring that area um actually going to Amiens hopefully for lunch or a drink we will see what time it is but also some of the most famous Memorials of the Battle of the Somme. Oh and the right is 220 km 135 miles. So let's go QUAZY!
Oh is that our first stop? Yes! Yes it's called Terre Neuvien Memorial and it should give us um well a realistic idea of what the fighting would have been like in uh WWI. Because um there's I think 30 hectares area with a well preserved um well system of trenches. And Terre Neuvien is for NewFoundland? Yes, it's also called I think Beaumont-Hamel NewFoundland Memorial in English. OK. Oh, you can see the area. OK let's have a look. There is a visitor centre straight at your right when you enter the site where you can also join a free guided tour I think it's every hour. But you can also wander around on your self and then it's definitely recommended to go to little mount with the proud statue of the caribou which was the emblem of the Royal NewFoundland regiment that served here. From this little mount you have an overall view of the site and the maze of trenches and the ground pitted with um bomb holes. As you can see there are many foot paths that you can use to discover the
site and then you will get into no man's land and reach the danger tree. And that was a tree that was almost halfway in no man's land and served as kind of a marker for the soldiers but a lot of the soldiers died even before reaching that tree. And you can see there's a few cemeteries on site as well. Well you can easily spend a lot of time here but we still want to do some more riding and stop at another Memorial before we even get to Amiens. So let's go. Well we are crossing the river Somme here and then our second Memorial should be straight after it or close at least. The Memorial Australien, that's where we're headed.
Our second stop holds this Villers-Bretonneux military um Cemetery with over 2,100 graves of Commonwealth servicemen of the first world war of which 600 remain unidentified. And this Australian National Memorial behind it. As you can see the memorial consists of a central tower, which gives spectacular views on the surrounding countryside, flanked by wing walls commemorating the 10,719 Australian casualties who died in France and who have no known grave. And during World War II this Tower was used as an observation Point by the French.
Of course we will share the link of this Memorial but also the Terre Neuvien Memorial in the e-book that you can download together with the GPX file from our website. And our next stop is Amiens. Well we added the official parking to the GPX but we found this unofficial claimed by bikers parking which is a very good point to park your bike here in Amiens. And you will find uh many nice bars and terraces on the Place Parmentier and along the river Somme. Well the travel guide explicitly said that Amiwna is more than its cathedral, but we didn't even make it to its cathedral because we spent a lot of time at those memorials. And um well we're a bit over halfway of this ride so we need to make some miles.
Well Johan, we hit a French traffic jam. All milk factories. All milk factories on the the road in .... god what is that name: le Souich. Hello ladies. Oh look at the dog he's. Yeah the dog is like a sheep dog, but.. It's like a cheep dog. but you're a cow dog. A cow dog.
Yeah. A cow dog. Good job. Bye cowboy. Avesnes-le-ComteI I think that's how you pronounce it. But we did add a stop here that if we wouldn't want to go from the last stop in Amiens to our last Memorial and Arras in one go. So Johan, do you want to stop? Uh no let's go to Vimy. Vimy. Well I did read that this Village they call it a pristine village straight out of a post card. But anyway we'll uh pass through it.
And maybe if you want because you can download to GPX file you can uh have a quick break here. Nice Village. It is nice. French. French, old. There is a bar here at the left. Um okay there's a fair going on we wanted to go there.
But then we will uh just head straight to our last stop. And well we've already been to the NewFoundland uh Memorial and the Australian Memorial and do you know what Vimy is? Vimy is Canadian. Canadian. So we had uh most of the uh countries that uh sent their soldiers here. Yeah. Look, it's a sober monument on this Vimy hill, but it's described with the I think 11,285 names of the fallen Canadian here. And it should give us some views on the surroundings and the former battlefields as well so. Vimy, the Canadian Memorial.
Wow Vimy Memorial is very impressive and not only because of this Memorial because um near the Visitor Center there also some uh trenches that even give you a better idea of what they've been like than the ones at uh um the Terre Neuvien Memorial. Yeah I I think I thought this one is much more impressive. Like the trenches are more impressive even than the one in Terre Neuvien. Yeah. Yeah. So if you are choosing which one you want to go to... I would say Vimy yeah Vimy yeah. But if you are doing all of them like us: Leave early! Start early! Because it's um quite late already and we're quite done.
Well and then um the ride back to um Arras, Arras Centre is still about 10 km 6 miles and of course the our gpx if you download it from my website and use that one we'll bring you back back to the centre, but um I think it's time to end the video what you think. Yeah let's let's go home. Let's go home. I want a beer. Yeah. Yeah, let's go home to that first beer and uh well we think that um yeah the area is beautiful to do a nice motorcycle ride in and like Arras is um both beautiful but with a moving history and they really keep it alive with the well-kept memorials. And uh well we also have a video with the top % things to do in Arras and it's in the middle of your screen uh if you want to keep going QUAZY now. And um then we hope that you like this video and if you did: hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, ring the bell! You can do it! And then we'll see you on our next QUAZY RIDE. Byebye. Byebye.
2023-11-03 01:00
