A group of 21 students, parents and staff will be taking a walk through history, as they leave on Saturday, April 15 for a 10-day tour of historic sites related to the First and Second World Wars in Europe.
This will be teacher Jody Kerr’s seventh trip with the Comp Travel Club, and this one will be different from most as it was timed to have the group visit the Vimy Ridge memorial on the 100th anniversary of that key battle of the First World War.
The group will first land in Amsterdam and spend the first two days there, where the group will visit the Anne Frank House, do some sightseeing around Amsterdam and visit the National Holocaust Memorial and the Jewish Historical Museum.
“We’ll spend the next five days going cross-country to the northern coast of Belgium and France, and we’ll visit two Canadian war cemeteries,” said Kerr, noting the stops will include Passchendaele, and the farm where Canadian doctor John McRae wrote “In Flanders Fields”.
At Menin Gate, they will see the Last Post ceremony which is performed at 8 p.m. every night as a memorial to fallen Canadian soldiers.
The tour will then stop at the Vimy Ridge Memorial, which includes the foxholes and tunnels preserved from the battle of 100 years ago, on land that was gifted to Canada by France in honour of the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers in this crucial battle.
The tour will then take the group to Normandy where they will visit Juno Beach and other landing sites during the Normandy Invasion, and they will also visit some of the coastal towns in the area.
The group will visit the island monastery of Mont St. Michel, which is only accessible by a road at low tide.
“It’s very untouched and historical,” said Kerr, noting there is a Harry Potter-like castle on top of rock outcropping, which the students are excited to pay a visit to.
To end the European tour, the group will spend a day in Paris doing a whirlwind tour that will include the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Arc De Triomphe, with a boat tour on the Seine River to close out the day.
Kerr noted many of the students have been doing research about some of the destinations they will be visiting, and are very excited about making the trip.
“This was a tour I’ve been looking forward to for a long time,” said Kerr, noting they timed it to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Vimy Ridge.
He also noted he had a grandfather who was part of the second wave in the Normandy Invasion, and others in the group also have family connections to some of the wartime sites they are visiting.
In the seven years the Travel Club has been going on these tours, Kerr estimates they’ve taken over 200 students and parents. The trip next year will be a tour of European countries including Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, and they are taking registrations for this trip now as most of these trips take a full year of planning, including how students arrange to earn the funds to pay for the trip.
