Day 29: Wailly to Lille

September 7, 2024

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Our last night's stay was a chambre d'hotes called Chez Marianne. The house had been fully renovated, and it was a spotlessly clean modern environment with lots of plexiglas, chrome, and modern art. This is not usually our kind of thing, but one item that looked very good, here in France, was a modern acrylic and fairly large bathtub. In keeping with the minimalist esthetic of the house, this had exactly one control. You can sort of see the knob on the right in the photo. The tall thing beside it is the elegant pull-out shower wand. The water flow to fill the tub comes from somewhere on the rim at the left, I think. I only think this, because despite all efforts I could not get any water to flow. I looked all around that tub, pressed on the black head rest, in case it harbored a control panel, and even pressed the switch on the wall (which only raised the blinds). Finally I thought I would play it smart, and get a manual online. I got Google Lens to find me the model of the tub, but you know bathtubs do not usually come with user manuals. I was stymied (plus hot and dirty), and also felt really stupid, but I had to give up. Hearing the story in the morning, Dodie asked if I had then just taken a shower. To be honest, by then, though I peeked at the shower, it looked too complicated given how tired I was.

In the morning I asked our hosts about to work the tub. "Oh, sorry", they exclaimed, "it had developed a leak so we disconnected the water supply". Duh!

Wailly turned out to have very very little of interest. It looked like this, with plain modern houses and a small newish church:

To be fair, the place, including the church, had been flattened in 1916:

We were into open fields very quickly out of Wailly, and then it was only a short run to the outskirts of Arras.

Arras outskirts have a bit of the northern France industrial brick look that we would encounter more of later in the day.

Approaching downtown, the streetscape is quite interesting.

Ah that is city hall up ahead. The Route Barrée is thrown in just for effect.

When we got into the square that fronts the elaborate city hall, we were thrilled to find that we had stumbled on yet another Market. This one was huge, larger, we daresay, than even Arles.

The first thing we noticed was lots of fresh garlic, ironically from Provence (where Arles is).

And more gladiolus than we have ever grown, more in fact than we have ever seen.

A honey producer had lots of different items. He not only said ok for a photo, but wanted to be in it. His stuff had apparently won several awards.

This is a good shot showing city hall and the square formed by the uniquely shaped buildings.

There were several rotisseries at this very large market, but this was the largest one:

There was lots you could buy beside just whole or half chickens.

Down the way, a baker had muhn (poppyseed) pastries. This is common in Germany but the first time we have seen it in France. Muhn is my favorite!

Ah here is a market standard (for Arles, anyway), paella. See anything crawling out?

But this really did my heart good - an absolutely huge wok of cous cous ready tagine type stuff.

In this far corner, almost out of the market, was a scene that struck me a quintessentially French. It was the market stalls together with the Boulangerie, and the surrounding buildings. What could we shoot in a Canadian town, that would be so quintessential, I mused. Well, I had actually tried it while cycling to little Lake Cowichan village, not so far from home. All I could come up with was the local A&W (hamburger shop).

We took one more little turn in the main market, discovering some we had never seen before: smoked fresh garlic.

The lady explained it to us and gave us a sniff.

We really wished we could have bought and tried cooking with these.

We reluctantly left the market, and peeked down a few side streets like the one below, before presto! we were out of town.

In Canada on the Prairies we used water towers to locate the next town. They looked a lot like the "pins" in Google Maps. But in France, of course, you use church steeples.

We hadn't deliberately planned it, but our route went right by the Canadian WWI memorial on Vimy Ridge. It's a sobering place, where the earth is still churned up with multiple shell holes, and where there are still warnings about unexploded ordnance.

Can you imagine being here when this happened?

The Canadian monument overlooking the ridge is elegant and impressive.

This figure looking down the ridge is very evocative. In the distance are those pyramidal shapes, we would soon learn more about those, to our dismay.

I do think that impressive as the monument is, it is overladen with naked Greek god/goddess type figures and metaphors about reaching for the heavens.

There was a flock of sheep by the monument, and obviously one took off. The shepherd and his dogs have gone after it, into the danger zone.

We headed down the ridge, and past towns like Givenchy en Gohelle. There was a market there too, but it was all dry goods, except for one rotisserie.

Here along the route are some shadow soldiers. It seems to be a Canadian erected display.

We now entered a track running through the town of Lens. Lens had been a major coal mining area . Now like many such areas it has been rehabilitating itself, creating many linked green areas, having the former coal train line as a rail trail, and with a giant museum devoted to the coal days.

The "bad" old days. See the giant slag heaps (visible from Vimy).

One rather good thing coming from the coal days was worker housing that was designed to be fairly attractive, and with large back gardens. This was started in 1894 but got destroyed in the war. It was rebuilt starting in 1920.

We came at last to the main mine site, which is somehow referred to as Pits 11 and 19. The bikeway led us right up to this, ... and died.

We faced these barricades and concrete strips, and no indication about where the route would go, if it were going.

I got Dodie's bike to where you see her there, and then had to retrieve mine too.

This invitation to explore the site is behind a barricade!

We passed right in front of that tall structure.

We see from this that those concrete strips were part of the nice path they are making for us!

But ok, beyond the pit site, the rails have been filled in and its smooth sailing for us!

Except for this! But what they don't know is that The Grampies are not the "public"!

A little later, some kind of stupid park almost stopped us, with this British style barricade. We were just able to do it, by backing the bikes in and swinging the gate to the extent that it moved. Once in the park we soon had to repeat the process to escape. If I had had my tractor or tools, I would have gladly pushed this silly installation down.

We continued to noodle our way out of the grip of Lens, losing all kinds of time in the process. We also encountered other examples of worker housing, most less pleasing than the 1920's version.

Our route now began to parallel the Deule river, which runs right to Lille. We are on the lookout for another Little Grebe, since we weren't quite happy with the shot from the other day, but all we saw we Crested Grebes.

It took a while to get over Lens, and to appreciate that the bikeway beside the Deule really was nice.

We came to an neighbourhood with lots of boats moored in the canal, and then to one where lots of people were enjoying a park like and marine setting. All the while I was expecting central Lille and our hotel to imminently pop up. But no. Trail signs gave it 15 km to Lille. And as we pedaled on, those signs seemed to give up kms very reluctantly - 14, 14, 13 ...are we there yet??

What are all these people doing out here at this river crossing passerelle?

Ok, this is a bit downtown - de Gaulle's birth house!

Ok, here are our downtown shots. It turns out we hit most of the "must see" buildings, not that we know right now which is which. Possibly tomorrow we can shoot something more organized. But even from this, you can see that Lille has a glorious large pedestrian area and some very fancy buildings. Also, on the Saturday night, lots of people enjoying walking around.