Day 7: Wednesday, July 7th, 2027 (Vimy and Ypres)
Leave Normandy Region heading to Ypres
Visit the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial
This morning you will have a guided visit of the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial, built to commemorate and honour all of the soldiers from Newfoundland and Labrador who were killed during the First World War. Opened in 1925, the memorial features a 15m bronze caribou overlooking the battlefield and remaining trenches. The site also includes an excellent visitors’ centre which details the story of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. As the largest memorial site of the six memorials erected by the Government of Newfoundland following the First World War, it is an immersive, contemplative, humbling and emotional experience for all who visit.
- During the battle of the Somme, the Newfoundland Regiment was ordered over the top at Beaumont-Hamel, in a suicidal attack on the German front line. Out of 800 Newfoundlanders who attacked, only 68 survived to answer role call the next day.
Click here for tour guide to Beaumont Hamel
Visit the Vimy Ridge Historic Site
Walk along Vimy Ridge, where in 1917, Canadian troops came together to accomplish what larger British and French forces had failed to do, and what would become a defining moment in the first World War. See where these brave soldiers charged over the ridge, marching under continuous, heavy fire and cleverly isolating the German troops in their dugouts. A towering, white marble monument now marks Hill 145, the place where the capture of Vimy Ridge ended in a bayonet charge against machine-gun nests. Learn more about this stunning victory that Brigadier-General A.E. Ross called “the birth of a nation.”
Click here for a tour guide for vimy ridge
- Visit Rings of Remembrance. Over 500,000 names are listed from all nationalities who died fighting during the First World War in the small section of France that the monument overlooks.
Click here for Rings of Remembrance Tour Guide
Group Dinner in Ypres
Attend the “Last Post Ceremony” at the Menin Gate
Experience a unique and moving nightly ceremony to honour the dead of WWI. At exactly 8 pm up to six members of the regular buglers from the local volunteer Fire Brigade step into the roadway under the memorial arch and play the Last Post, followed by a short silence and Reveille. The Last Post Ceremony has become part of daily life in Ieper (Ypres) and the local people are proud of this simple but touching tribute to the courage and self-sacrifice of those who fell in defense of their town. This ceremony happens every day since the end of the First World War.