Most of Normandy’s D-Day/Battle of Normandy battlefield and memorial sites are both impressive and emotional, but once you get way from the coast and head inland, you begin to find evocative sites that are comparatively unknown and rarely visited. Here are ten sites, off the beaten path,...
The Musée Espace Air Passion at Angers airport does exactly what it says ‘on the tin’ – it’s a space, a giant hanger, filled with extraordinary aircraft and people who are passionate about them. The majority of the collection here is made up of rare, often unique,...
The Musée des Arts et Métiers (MuAM) in Paris is opening an 11-month exhibition on the Design and Creation of the Statue of Liberty. Lady Liberté: Sweat, Boldness, Genius traces the technical odyssey behind the universal monument. Marking the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of...
It’s hard to imagine the U-boat war being conducted from a group of bunkers in the wooded grounds of a château just outside Angers, miles from the coast and the U-boat bases. But that’s exactly the point. The British raid on Saint-Nazaire in March 1942 (Operation Chariot)...
(And the rescue of a wounded American soldier) This roadside monument on a long straight stretch of the D31 road between the villages of Larchamp and Ernée in the Mayenne department of France, marks the point of first contact on 4th August 1944 between US troops advancing...
The former Musée des 24 Heures du Mans (“The Museum of the 24 Hours of Le Mans”) has undergone a renovation and will be re-opening its doors on 28th May 2026, 16 days before this year’s 24hr race event, as simply M24 – Musée du Sport Automobile....
The Hispano-Suiza 18.Sb is a rather quirky but powerful 18-cylinder aero-engine that kinda got lost in history! It was designed originally as the Hispano-Suiza 18R to compete in the 1929 Schneider Trophy for seaplanes. It was ordered by the French Air Ministry who needed a 1200 horsepower...
Operation Dynamo was the name given to the hurried extraction of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), plus allies (mostly French), from the beach at Dunkirk (Dunkerque) in May/June 1940. The Musée Dunkerque 1940 is located in Bastion 32, the headquarters for the French and Allied forces during...
The French Ministry of Culture has announced a nationwide festival of photography in 2026 to mark the 200th anniversary of the world’s first permanent photograph recorded by Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce. Niépce’s photograph, ‘View from the window at Le Gras’ dated between 1826-1827 was taken from his study...
Yesterday, the French shipping company Neoline held a naming ceremony in its registration port of Nantes for its first sail-powered Roll-on Roll-off (RoRo) cargo ship. As I write, Neoliner Origin, is heading down the Loire estuary* passing the Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard at St. Nazaire where she...
I love this quirky little French 6-wheeler from 1939. It’s a Laffly V15T with 4-wheel drive, plus an extra two wheels to get it over lumps & bumps! It had a top speed of 58 kph and was used primary by the French cavalry as an artillery...
The Wellington Quarry, or Carrière Wellington, is a World War I memorial, museum and battlefield site, in, or rather under, the streets of Arras in Pas-de-Calais, France. It played a significant role in hiding thousands of British & Commonwealth troops for weeks before unleashing them in a...
This is the fuselage, or ‘gondola’, of the rather extraordinary French WW1 Voisin X bomber and gunship. The Voisin X was a two-seat pusher biplane produced either as a night bomber or a gunship armed with a 37 mm (1½”) Hotchkiss cannon and a defensive 7.7mm machine...
Fort des Dunes is a 19th century fort built among the sand dunes at Leffrinckoucke in Northern France just behind the famous beach of Dunkirk. In fact it lies about eight kilometres from the border with Belgium and six kilometres from the centre of Dunkirk, so roughly...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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