Arras - France

(John) October 5 - Insomnia has kicked in.  I’ve been awake since 3:30am.  We are in a hotel room in Arras in the Pas de Calais region of France.  This is our first night in France and so far the casual way in which we approached our first five days here has paid off – more or less.

Partly because we could not decide what to do or where to go and partly because we had been too busy in England enjoying the company of friends and family to get on with it, we still had not booked any accommodation for the first 5 nights in France.  Despite this we were pretty relaxed coming over on the ferry from Dover.  I can really only speak for myself as I am the one more comfortable with a plan, Lesley is far more capable of winging it.  We firmly believed that France would be empty in October.  In the UK there is not a child on the streets between 9 am and 3 pm.  The truant officers swoop down on the miscreants and chastise their parents for being irresponsible should they find a child out shopping during a school day.  I did not expect the rest of Europe to be any different.  So with everyone busy raising children there would obviously be no tourists in France and we would have our pick of accommodation.  I was sure that all manner of hotels, motels, chambre d’hôtes, self-catering cottages and apartments would be easily available to us at bargain prices.  Hence, no worries.  The ferry was virtually empty, just us, a few lorry drivers and a handful of retired people.  In hindsight this should of concerned me.  I had not considered that we might be in competition for hotel rooms with retirees.  However, as yet undaunted, our plan was roughly thus. We would drive off the ferry, find a tourist office and a friendly French lady, who would be so enamoured by our beautiful and intelligent children, that if she was not able to take us home and show us off to all her friends, she would call in a favour and put us onto a cheap but perfect gîte (French holiday cottage). 

It didn’t quite work out that way, but it was close.  We did drive off the ferry – good start.  Then we found a little supermarket where we bought our first camembert and bottle of 1.5 euro wine, then we found the tourist office and the nice French lady who appeared totally unimpressed by our children who were actually not looking all that good and not being cute or adorable in any way.  Nor were they doing anything to suggest they might be intelligent.  She did not offer us her summer cottage to stay in or even so much as find us a cheap hotel.  Though, she did let us take a pile of pamphlets that gave us an idea of what to expect to pay for a hotel room.  We were still pretty relaxed though and just loving all the French stuff that is everywhere in France.  We decided to just head down to Arras, as the Lonely Planet said it was a pretty nice town with a youth hostel that we reckoned would probably be empty and would be a great place to begin our French adventure.  We had a lovely drive through the countryside until our N road route was closed for construction and we detoured to the autoroute, a toll road, for the last 60 kms.  (For the curious, that was 3.90 Euros)

Arras is gorgeous.  The youth hostel no longer exists; so much for buying the latest edition of the Lonely Planet guide.  However, we were undaunted and we wandered around admiring all the Flemish architecture (you don’t just get French stuff in France, they have lots of other stuff too) and inquiring in hotels.  Well when I say ‘we’ I mean Lesley and the children did, I haven’t quite warmed up to speaking to French people yet (it's my french that's the problem not french people).  We had said earlier in the day that if we left it really late to find a hotel we would be more decisive and more capable of spending around 80 Euros for a room, which is exactly what happened.  So after finding the first two hotels we canvassed, full, we stayed in the Hotel Astoria, opposite the train station, where we can watch the TGV trains come in and out.  It’s not exactly quiet, but it is clean, the beds are comfortable, the shower is great, and hey, we are in France.  Today we move out of town a short distance.  When we were in Hastings we had unsuccessfully tried to get hold of the owners of a Gite near Arras.  Yesterday, Lesley figured out how to access the free Wi-Fi, picked up an email from the gite people and phoned the owners, so for the next three days we will have our own place in the country for just 50 Euros a night.

Photos: 2 Views of Grande Place - Arras, Place des Heros - Arras.