With My Swag All on My Shoulder: Paris to Amiens

Up early this morning to pack up and catch the 8.28 train at Paris Gare du Nord. An hour and a half later, we were in Amiens. We invited Caelli's French friend Julien (who lives in Lille) to join us for the day, and he met us at the station; his train having arrived before ours. We walked to our hotel and left our suitcases, then walked past the Cathedral to Avis to pick up our car.

Today we were driving around the Somme, looking for some Creswick diggers. After a couple of detours (for lunch supplies and blutack), we headed out of Amiens and towards Villers-Bretonneux. First stop: the Australian National Memorial. At almost every cemetery we stopped at today, we took a photo with Caelli and I holding the Australian flag.

It took us several backtracks and two stop-and-asks to find Heilly Station Cemetery at Mericourt l'Abbe, which has 2878 graves. We had lunch here.

We decided that we were running out of time and would skip one of our planned cemeteries. On to the Guard's Cemetery at Lesboeufs, with 1493 graves.

The Australian Cemetery at Bapaume was always going to be hard to find. The town of Baupaume wasn't on the map I'd picked up at the Tourist Info Centre, and it was a tiny cemetery with only 87 graves. We knew the basic direction, but in the end Caelli asked a chap who was working in his front garden in a village just outside Bapaume. This took quite a while, it seemed to the three of us left in the car, with much gesticulating on the man's behalf and Caelli repeating many statements. Caelli returned with quite detailed verbal instructions. They turned out to be completely accurate, and we would never have found the cemetery without them - down a dirt road next to backyards, with several people working in their veggie gardens. This cemetery also had quite a large number of German graves, including a couple of "Soldier of the Great War, known unto God" in German.

Rapidly running out of time (the car was due back at 5.30pm), we pushed on towards Puchevillers. On the way we made a very brief stop at Thiepval, which is the largest British battle memorial in the world. There is a medium sized cemetery, but the monument, with many, many names engraved on its many, many panels, is enormous.

Onwards! We got to Puchevillers at 5.10pm (with a half hour trip back to Amiens, mind you), and couldn't find the British Cemetery on the road we thought it was on. We turned back to head home and saw a sign up a street we had passed before. You had to be coming from a certain direction in order to read it - it was on a wall and only visible to southbound traffic. Quick turn to follow the sign for a further 2km, up a dirt road behind the town and through wheat and canola fields. There were two Creswick diggers buried here amongst the 1756 graves. No time for photos of the cemetery, just poppies, flag and a quick photo of the headstone, then back to Amiens as quickly as Phil could manage. We made good time and might have been back by 5.40pm, except that the centre of Amiens is all one way streets, and they weren't marked on the pedestrian map we had. It took 10 minutes more to get there once we were within one kilometre! We didn't have time to fill the car with petrol and we'll cop a financial penalty for that, but at least we got there before they closed. They don't open again until Monday morning - we'll have been gone 24 hours by then!

We saw Julien off at the station and had a meal at a Turkish kebab place. Our hotel has a bath so Caelli and I plan to indulge tonight!