Classic and vintage car fans will be getting ready for next year’s Rétromobile in Paris in February. The annual Salon Rétromobile started in 1976 and is now one of the best-known collector car exhibitions in Europe, drawing around 130,000+ visitors, 450+ exhibitors and 500+ automobiles. It is...
One of the world’s most valuable watches will go on display for the first time in the UK in a new exhibition: Versailles: Science and Splendour, which opens on 12 December at the Science Museum in London. The No.160 watch by Abraham-Louis Breguet – named ‘Marie Antoinette’...
The Dunkirk Maritime and Port Museum (Musée Maritime & Portuaire de Dunkerque) tells the history of France’s third largest port, its workers, its ships, and its seamen. “Wait! What? Third largest?” That may come as a surprise to some, because to most people, especially anglophiles, Dunkerque or...
You have to love this amazing car, the Citroën P17 Autochenille (‘caterpillar’ or in this case ‘half-track’). It is exactly the sort of thing I would fully expect to see Tintin driving across the Sahara in, wearing an arab headress and with Capt. Haddock floundering around in...
Not many people outside France have heard of Puy du Fou*. Those international visitors who discover it, almost always become fans for life. The 500 acre park in the Vendée region of France, packed with extraordinary attractions, refers to itself as a historical ‘theme park’ with period...
The Calais Memorial Museum (Le Musée Mémoire 39-45 de Calais) is housed in a large (94m long) German WW2 concrete bunker in the middle of the Saint-Pierre park in downtown Calais. The bunker was a command post, built in 1941 for the Kriegsmarine (German Navy). Hidden among...
The ‘Bullecourt 1917, Jean & Denise Letaille Museum’, to give it its full name, is the home of an evocative collection of WW1 artefacts collected and preserved by Bullecourt farmer and former mayor, Jean Letaille and his wife Denise. Jean had been finding battlefield relics in his...
The huge World War II underground site in a clay quarry at Mimoyecques was the secret location intended for several batteries of German ultra long range superguns, Hitler’s V3 weapon, aimed at London. The V-Weapon Programme The Third Reich’s propaganda ministry first mentioned a sinister programme of...
The Fontinettes Boat Lift (Ascenseur à bateaux des Fontinettes) in Arques, Pas-de-Calais. is a magnificent piece of 19th century engineering and architecture. It was built in the late 19th century at Fontinettes* to replace a set of five locks on the Neuffossé canal which linked/s the canalised...
The Musée des Arts et Métiers (Museum of Arts and Crafts) in Paris is almost the French equivalent of the Science Museum in London, and it is absolutely packed with the most fascinating historic, scientific, mechanical, experimental and industrial exhibits. Be prepared to allocate plenty of time...
The Air & Space Museum (Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace), sprawled around the magnificent art deco terminal building at Paris’ former passenger airport, Le Bourget, is France’s premier aviation museum. It’s huge, and well worth the journey to the outskirts of Paris to visit. Only, make...
Arromanches-les-Bains is the site of the famous Mulberry B Artificial Harbour and home to the D-Day Landing Museum, known locally as the ‘Musée du Débarquement, Arromanches’, which focuses on the astounding piece of engineering that still dominates the seascape today. My last visit to the museum was...
The Radar Museum 1944 is on the site of the Germans’ largest radar station in the Calvados region of Normandy. The original top-secret site covered a huge 10 hectares on the plateau outside the town of Douvres*. However the museum and its bunkers cover only a small...
These days, the huge fortified bunker built by the Germans in 1941 to protect its U-boats, is no longer referred to as the “U-boat base” or “the U-boat pens”. Instead they simply call it the ‘submarine base’, maybe to disassociate it from its origins, but we all...
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.
