In Amiens

July 27, 2024 to July 28, 2024

As you like it.

Taking two days to slow down and look about is relaxing for us. We walk to the market and buy vegetables and chicken for dinner. There’s a reasonable variety of vegetables and the artichokes seem to be offering us a challenge. So exotically wonderful looking, but this is a challenge we decide can ignore.

Gigantic nectarines with gigantic flavour!

Later we visit the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It’s in remarkably good repair and is massive in size. During WWI sandbags were piled around pillars to offer some protection. The perspective when looking up from the floor of the nave is almost surreal because the mind expects there to be some sort of internal support for such a structure, but there’s nothing visible at all.

Twice the size of Notre Dame in Paris, this is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world.

The wooden tower soars to 112 metres. It is 16th century Oak covered in leaded tiles.

The sculptures are also in excellent condition and their detail is impressive.

The wooden carvings and stained glass are also beautiful.

While we see few references or memorials to WWI in Amiens itself, the cathedral makes reference to Commonwealth, British and American contributions.

On Sunday we take a walk across to the waterways part of the city in Saint Leu.
These are quite extensive with the Somme River running through the city, a lake for boating and a canal lined with restaurants and bars.

There’s clear been a time when life was centred on the water.

We stop for an ice cream and talk to some German cycle tourers who have come from Bruges. They’re heading south and ask about the canals.

Our last visit is to the Jules Verne Museum, situated in the house he lived in for more than 20 years, which fortuitously, is just over the road from the apartment we are staying in.

We’ve already noticed a heavy Jules Verne influence about the city where he lived and wrote and contributed to public affairs. This children’s playground references some of his popular novels and there are information panels with interesting details about his life and works to be found in a number of places.

Verne’s former home has an imposing tower on one corner with an internal spiral staircase and this serves to enable us to move up to different levels of the musēe.

Something I realise from reading about his novels, is just how many of them we read as children, in the Classics Illustrated series. It’s also clear that he had a fertile imagination and that he enjoyed the idea of travel. That imagination is an obvious reason that so many of his books have translated so well to the visual media.

The house is furnished to create the ambiance of his time and also to include physical references to his novels.

Unlike many maps we see, he actually includes New Zealand.

This is a city whose architecture we’ve found interesting and mostly pleasing to the eye- a good city to relax over a weekend.

A creative way to disguise the plain frontage of a modern building.

The Cirque d’Amiens. Opened by Jules Verne.

This is our last day in Amiens- tomorrow the plan is to move on to Abbeville and then the coast.
While Jules Verne might have been fascinated by endless travels, we need to look to our final weeks.

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