Private Canadian WW1 Vimy & Somme Battlefield Tour from Arras or Lille

This excursion was completely over and above anything we expected! Claude, our guide, is top notch. Very knowledgeable and helpful. We would highly recommend this excursion.

Our guide, Claude, was outstanding. We originally planned to tour the WW1 sites by ourselves, but opted for the tour. Solo would have been very difficult due to poor signage and other factors. The tour was good value and well worth the money. We departed from Lille. Claude was knowledgeable!

This was an excellent all day tour which we highly recommend. Our guide Claude picked us up directly at our hotel at 9:00 and we went straight to the Vimy Ridge site, where we spent the majority of the morning. We visited the memorial, museum, cemetery and tunnels and drove around the site. We then drove to the Battle of the Somme sites where we had a good lunch at a small country restaurant restaurant. In the afternoon we visited Australian battlegrounds and cemetery, a large crater created by an explosion under the trenches, and the British memorial and museum. Canadians were also involved at these sites as evidenced by gravestones in the cemeteries. As we had visited the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland memorial a few days before, Claude took us instead to the peaceful South African memorial in a forest. Claude provided with us with expert information on all of the sites that we saw, the major WW1 battles in both France and Belgium, and all sorts of other information on northern France and Belgium. We had ample opportunities to ask questions and get further elaboration.

We saw what was advertised including Vimy Ridge, Neuville Saint Vaast Canadian N2 Cemetery, Courcelette Canadian Memorial, Thiepval Memorial, and the Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial. We also stopped in front of but did not get out to walk around a number of other memorials including a memorial to one of the Australian divisions involved in the Battle of the Somme I'm pretty sure that we would have been able to walk around if we had asked. Probably my favourite location was Vimy Ridge although every stop was quite interesting in its own way. The Thiepval Memorial to the missing is really quit staggering with the 73,000 names of soldiers with no known graves. Our guide, Claude, spoke excellent English, was quite personable and really knew his stuff. He provided in-depth descriptions of each site and was able to easily answer every question we asked. We also never felt rushed.