The last week.

Right then, after a week in cyber wilderness we’re back on line…. kind of.
Hopefully I will finally update Germany, tell you where we went and post some cool photos.

Bonjour from France btw!!!

We drove today (Monday) from Amsterdam down to Amiens in Northern France with a stop over before hitting Paris tomorrow.
Rachel is going to cover Amsterdam; I’m told I had a great time!

Amiens is smack bang in the middle of the Somme area which has great significance for NZer’s particularly from WW1 and the Battle of the Somme. As we drove thru it this evening the Autumn fog/haze covered much of the historic battlegrounds and it was bloody weird.
Both of us commented on the spiritual feel to the place before we knew where we were and the significance of the paddocks we were passing thru. The pictures and old footage I have seen of the Somme showed soldiers knee deep in mud fighting across trenches and barbed wire. It was not hard to imagine today and I couldn’t help but wonder just what gets ploughed up every year as the farmer works his land.
Seeing the line where the front was in 1916 was very humbling indeed.

Amiens is nice enough, about the size of Rotorua perhaps but like much of Europe we have seen is under serious development at the moment and the town centre actually looks like a war zone with the entire centre area being developed all at once. Our GPS didn’t handle it at all and with most of the streets blocked off or converted to one way it’s fair to say the in-car tension was high!
We actually arrived in Amiens at 6pm, but didn’t get to our hotel, hungry and thirsty, until after 9pm.

We checked in and went straight to dinner before going to our room just after 11pm. I decided to clear my emails, update here etc, but the reality of being in France soon kicked in.
YES, they do have free wireless LAN if you have a local cell phone connection. If not you can buy a 24 hours all access connection with unlimited use.
"OK", I said "I will have one of those", but no.
They do not /cannot sell the connections between 11pm and 3am.
No reason given, they just don’t.

If I had bought it at 10.59pm, I could use it all night, but after 11pm I can’t buy one until after 3am.
Sacre Bleu!