The National Army Museum will be opening its doors to the public on Thursday (30 March) after a £23.75m redevelopment that sees the building transformed from what the Director General, Janice Murray, described to me as a gloomy warren “rather like a car park”, to a bright...
A brand new museum focused on D-Day and its connections to the American servicemen that left Britain in 1944 for the Normandy beaches, has just opened in Portland, Dorset. The Castletown D-Day Centre has been in the planning for several years and it is perfectly placed within...
It’s not a spectacular building. In fact it’s what it always used to be – a college. But this nondescript building next to the station in Reims is historic. This is where World War II ended in Europe. This is where the Germans signed their (first) unconditional...
The build-up to the 100th anniversary of the end of The Great War continues to grow and so do the associated memorials, museums and interpretation centres in Belgium & France. In the French Ardennes, the War & Peace Museum is due to re-open on 11th November 2017...
If you are a 'foodie' - you like your food and you're interested how it's made/processed - then this is for you.
The National Railway Museum in York is just one of those key landmark museums in the UK, like the Science Museum in London, or IWM Duxford, that you have to see… and you don’t have to sacrifice any ‘me time’ away from your family or partner to...
I had heard of the Japanese WW2 balloon bomb campaign, but until I was reading David Hambling’s new book, Swarm Troopers – How small drones will conquer the world *, I hadn’t been aware that there had been civilian casualties. In fact these were the only deaths...
I’ve got a special place in my heart for the Yorkshire Air Museum. I visited a lot of aircraft museums this summer (well… four!) and they’ve all got amazing exhibits and displays to talk about, but the Yorkshire Air Museum made me the happiest. There’s something special...
Nobody visits Stockholm, for business or pleasure, without visiting the Vasa Museum, and that’s as it should be – the Vasa is, without doubt, one of the great treasures of the world. The story The Vasa was King Gustavos Adolphus’ brand new flagship for the Swedish Navy...
The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, has been working with Microsoft to digitise the interiors of some of its aircraft. It means that visitors to the museum, and to the museum’s website, can wander through the cockpit and interiors on the Surface Pro tablets carried by...
The Air Museum at Duxford, one of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) sites, is probably the most important, ‘must-see’ aircraft museum in the UK. If you haven’t been, you really should, it is excellent. There are a number of things that set it apart. Firstly, its history....
This is a memorial I stumbled across outside a church in Nottinghamshire a year ago. There’s not a great deal of information on the memorial itself but thanks to the efforts of a number of people who have been diligently researching the loss of Lancaster W4270 with...
If you are anywhere near the city of Chartres (SW of Paris) on 17 September, you should see the Festival of Lights (Fête de la Lumière) that night. It marks the climax of the 2016 season (16 Apr – 08 Oct) which sees many (27) of Chartres...
For some nationalities, like us Brits, it’s a little hard to understand the role of France’s customs force, les Douanes. We have customs officers standing around at airports & ports, checking bags, opening shipping containers, and so on, but they are viewed as bureaucrats or government officials....
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
COPYRIGHT © MECHTRAVELLER 2016-2025, including all images unless indicated otherwise.
