Euro Cup continues - First Stop Lille

Now remember how crazy my life was leading up to this point? Well, I was also planning this trip so I may have gone a bit crazy with what we could pack into a day!

We left bright and early Friday, July 1st (Canada Day for you non-Canadian readers) and headed to Lille. It was July but the weather was cool and not great for being outside. I wore a sweatshirt the entire weekend! We arrived, dropped off our stuff and then headed for a beer - I mean lunch. We had a tour departing in a couple of hours!

Proudly Canadian!

The crazy thing is on our way to catch the tour, people were already gearing up for the evening match!

Most of the tours available from Lille have to do with first World War. We picked because it included Vimy Ridge but first up was the Lens 1914-18 Great History War Centre.  The displays in the Centre cover battles that took place in the Nord-Pas-de Calais region of France. The Centre is in an area that occupied a strategic position between Ypres (Belgium) and the Somme in France. The village itself was destroyed during the 1915 Battles of Artois. Of course, it has since been rebuilt. The exhibition is pretty well done.

Next stop - Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, which is home to the largest First World War cemetery in France and the great Ring of Remembrance, an architectural oval that was inaugurated in 2014 and bears the names of 580,000 dead soldiers of all nationalities. The ground was strategically important during the First World War and was bitterly contested in a series of long and bloody engagements between the opposing French and German armies during the three battles of Artois.

The Cemetary

Ring of Remembrance

The white is all the names

Panel after panel around the ring. . .

You can see all the way to Vimy

The last stop of the tour was Vimy Ridge. It was kind of poetic to be there on Canada Day as 1) it is in honour of the Canadians who fought this battle and the fact that we won it! and 2) it is actually on Canadian land. So I was home for July 1st :) 

It's a pretty impressive memorial that given it's location and size is very moving.

sporting my Team Canada soccer jersey 

You can't walk here because it is still filled with landmines but you can still see where there were explosions

They only allow sheep to maintain the grass

And because we hadn't done enough this day, we headed back to Lille where the party had already started . . 

More layers and rain gear were required because it was pouring on our way to the first match of the trip - Belgium vs Wales. Our first of two quarter final games. We had crazy close seats, bit of a bizarre angle but at least no one sat in front of us! This game was awesome because Wales, who was expected to do nothing, beat Belgium!

Getting started

front row baby!

Ceremony starts

Game on!

Finally it was time for sleep!