France, 20th-22nd April, driving north

In contrast to the previous days the morning broke to a blue sky, a sure sign that we were leaving Vercors!

Alan wanted to cycle up the Combe Laval, retracing the tortuous route we had done the day before, so I packed everything away in the van while he expended some energy.

We drove north, stopping off in the town of Villefranche to take Hettie to the vet for the worm medication and check up she needed for her pet passport. Villefranche is not exactly a tourist destination and we were only charged €7 for the privilege compared to the €60 we have had to spend before.

We finally stopped in a small place called Chagny, just south of Beaune and we spent a little time in the town, having a beer as the sun went down.

The next morning we drove through manicured vineyards, and then further north towards St Omer.  

Now we were not far from Calais, but we wanted to see the bunker at La Coupole, sister to the one in Éperlecques which we had visited at the beginning of the holiday. So we stopped overnight and then got up early the next day as the sun was coming up.

We arrived in La Coupole before they had opened and so we hung around in the car park for a while. Hitler started building this bunker in September 1943, using more than a 1000 Russian men and women prisoners of war and conscripted Frenchmen. The construction was hampered by attacks by Allied bombers and finally by the use of Tallboy bombs, as had been deployed in Éperlecques. Hitler had been planning to unleash the V2 rocket from La Coupole, directed at London and the south east of England, but this plan was abandoned. The Allies reached la Coupole at the beginning of 1944, after the Normandy landings. 

The heart of the building is an enormous concrete dome. Unlike Éperlecques there is little to be seen externally as the dome is built into the side of a quarry and the building is entered by a tunnel. Hence it was not so good photographically, but as a museum it is very interesting and we must have spent around 3 hours looking at the displays which chronicle the stories of the Germans who had designed the building and the V2 rocket, and the pathetic lives of the enforced labour that they had used.

From here it was but a hop skip and a jump back across the Channel and home!