If you saw last week’s blog post you’ll know that we spent about a week on the northwest coast of France in the Pas-de-Calais departement in the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The object was to have some time to visit a part of the country that previously we’d only glimpsed from a railway carriage on our way from London to Paris, initially from a ferry port or years later after passing through the Channel Tunnel on the Eurostar. Once we’ve arrived in a city by train, our favorite method of transport is on foot, so we chose some destinations that were easily walkable from the station.

We knew of Boulogne-sur-Mer because on trips from the US to England years ago, it’s where we would arrive by ferry whenever we could “sneak” across the channel to get a taste of France. Once the Channel Tunnel opened, however, taking a train directly from London to Paris in a little over 2 hours, and maybe back that same evening, just made more sense. In those days, whether by ferry and train or later just by train, our destination was always the capital, so that coastal part of the country, known as Pas-de-Calais, remained unexplored by us. Now that we live here, there was time to go back to see what we had been missing in the port city and in the surrounding area.