Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 2: Wissant- Caffiers

The complexity of life simplified to a journey, one of the oldest of human undertakings

- Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity

Day 2 is always much easier than Day 1. That all-important first step has been taken, and all that remains to be done is to keep on putting one step in front of the other. Again and again. Your only other concerns being what to eat, and where to sleep.

These two essential needs had been well taken care of in Wissant, where I enjoyed a proper French gourmet meal with my new-found Canadian friends at the restaurant in their hotel, the Hotel Normandie, and a full ten hours of sleep in my cosy room at the Hotel de la Plage. Breakfast was somewhat challenging as it was a do-it-yourself affair: raw eggs were provided, with a vat of hot water to cook them in, bread was provided, with a toaster, and there were fresh oranges too, with a juicer. But none of these came with instructions, so I ended up with a raw egg (the water was hot, not boiling, and so a minute and a half was not nearly enough), burnt toast, and a bowl of orange juice, having neglected to replace the drip-catcher bowl with a drinking glass... Well, the next person to use the orange juicer couldn't even figure out how to turn it on, so I was one up on him!!

The breakfast buffet also included gourmet cheeses from the local dairy and the flakiest croissants I have ever eaten, so in the end I just about got my money's worth. I swear I thought the receptionist said trois euro when I asked how much breakfast was, the evening before! When I saw the size and quality of the spread, I began to have doubts she may have actually said treize euro - doubts that were confirmed when I came to the till! It's impossible to confuse 3 with 13 in English, or Italian, but in Spanish and French the two numbers sound very much alike, to the foreign ear. Making you wish everything either cost 2 or 4 euros, or 12 or 14 euros, instead, thus avoiding the whole issue!

And so I strode out into the morning, stomach full and wallet considerably lighter. Swearing I would watch my pocketbook more closely in the days to come, I followed 3 (trois!) ducks up the road through Wissant.

Leaving the town behind, I proceeded up a narrow country lane past La fromagerie en herbe, the very place where my gourmet breakfast cheese had been made, then struck off on a dirt road among the fields uphill to Mont du Couple, at 161 metres above sea level the highest eminence in the area. On the way up, I spotted the other Canadians outlined against the sky, and, turning round to look behind me, the chalk cliffs of Dover shining in the morning sun, looking like some sort of legendary Promised Land on the other side of the Channel. No wonder so many migrants flock to Calais in the hopes of getting there! The very cliffs appeared to be made of gold!

But they are "only" chalk - a substance that really ought to be more precious than gold, considering that it took a century to form every single millimetre of chalk that makes up those cliffs. And the hill I was climbing!

I caught up to the Canadians at the top, where the view was not fantastic, as the sun shone only on the Promised Land, while our side of the Channel was enshrouded in cloud and mist. The air was quite chilly, so we soon started walking again, hoping to find a hot cup of coffee in the next village, up at the top of the hill and appropriately named Hauteville. Henry and I, walking ahead of the other three ladies, were delighted to find that the café in Hauteville was called Au Relais des Canadiens!

Less delightful was the price of the coffee: €4.20 a cup!! ("And no free refills, either," as one of the Canadians noted.) Too ignorant of the French economy, on our second day in the country, to know whether this was the going rate or we were being had, we sat down for a break in the warmth of the café. I was glad now that I hadn't ordered a coffee myself, simply because it was already 11 and I have trouble sleeping when I drink coffee beyond breakfast-time!

At the Relais des Canadiens we lost one of our canadiennes, for Laurie had pain in her ankle, which she had injured before crossing the Channel, while walking from Canterbury to Dover. She decided it would best to rest her ankle for the remainder of the day, and asked the bartender to call her a taxi, which he duly did.

We just hope he didn't tell the taxi driver, "charge her as much as you want. These people are so dumb they'll pay four euros for a coffee!" 🤭

Henry, Haidee, Marjorie and I continued on our way, straightening off a bend in the official route of the Via Francigena/GR145 with one of Sandy Brown's proposed shortcuts along the road. There was little or no traffic this morning, and so we proceeded along the road until we came to the turnoff for the Forteresse de Mimoyecques. We agreed to take a short detour to visit this remarkable WW II site, a complex of tunnels on 3 (that's trois!) levels built by the Germans beginning in 1943. The first level alone, which we visited, consists of 2 km of tunnels - not all of which are open to visitors and included in the tour, fortunately for our weary feet - with the aim of burying giant super-cannons capable of firing missiles as far as London, 150 kilometres away!

La Forteresse de Mimoyecques

I'd like to quote Phil Stephenson of Phil & Mark's Road to Rome for a succinct explanation of what this fascinating but hard-to-spell WW II site is all about. Phil & Mark are walking a day ahead of me and have been providing helpful hints and useful information via Messenger and through their interesting, well-written and amusing Facebook page. Here is their explanation of Mimoyecques:

Allied superiority in the air following the Battle of Britain meant that Germany was unable to inflict the kind of damage on London from the air that the Allies had been inflicting on the Ruhr. Consequently Germany had resorted to missiles. We were aware of the V1 and V2 but today we learned of the V3. A relatively small calibre missile capable of reaching London fired from 50° shafts dug over 100m into the ground at Fortresse de Mimoyecques. It took something like 1500 men including volunteer miners from the Ruhr committed to retribution as well as forced labour from Poland and camps in the Channel Islands only a few months to build, but the scale of the engineering operations was reported by French resistance and noted by RAF observers. Alive to the threat, the Allies under the command of Leonard Cheshire mounted a huge aerial attack which included a number of Barnes Wallis' 'tallboy' bombs - huge things 6.5m tall capable of causing damage equivalent to a small earthquake. Only one of these hit the target but it was enough to destroy the launch shaft. However, you can imagine the devastation on the surrounding villages was terrible.

And in fact aerial photographs included in the exhibit show the area around the facility pitted with craters from the massive Allied bombing campaign that destroyed the fortress. But the most poignant part of the exhibits set up at Mimoyecques was a series of panels displaying the photographs and stories of individual airmen, of all nationalities, who fought in the skies above Calais and the surrounding area during WW II, many losing their lives in horrible plane crashes. One hit the ground so fast that he was buried in his plane six metres below the surface, and only exhumed in 2006, his body, possessions and airplane all surprisingly well-preserved under the chalky soil.

This display and memorial was followed by an equally informative and less heart-rending display about the life cycle of bats, 350 of whom hibernate in the tunnels, making them the largest bat hibernation centre in the whole of Northern France. A true bat city! But we arrived at Mimoyecques the day after the complex opened to visitors for the season, and the bats had already moved to their summer residences elsewhere.

Like the bats, we left the dark, cold, damp tunnels in search of food, and sat by a nice warm radiator in the snack area provided at the entrance to the site, picnicking on various items pilfered from our respective hotel breakfasts. We then continued straight along Rue de la Forteresse to the village of Landrethun-le-Nord, where we rejoined the Via Francigena, leaving the town and walking on a rather muddy dirt track across the fields toward a vast railway yard full of freight cars, which, my hostess informed me later in the day, are taking gravel from pits in Caffiers to Paris in order to build the facilities for the upcoming Olympics.

Upon reaching Caffiers I turned off in the direction of my accommodations for the evening, a room in a farmhouse in Ventu, just outside Caffiers. I walked into the farmyard, knocked on the door and in no time I was seated at the table with a cup of tea, chatting with the owner, Marilyn (to the extent of my limited ability in French).

Having thus already solved one of the two existential problems of the day - where to sleep - well in advance at only 2:30 pm, I resolved to solve the other - what to eat - by lightening my pack consuming what remained of my fruit, cheese and bread.

But Marilyn has just come up to offer me a bowl of vegetable soup for dinner, so that problem is solved, too!