Motorcycle Explorer June 2015 Issue 6 | Page 138

Craig, Barbara and I headed south towards the Channel Tunnel, our route across the channel and our first overnight stop in the city of Ypres in Belgium, famous the world over for the Menin Gate and the slaughter of human life in the First World War. The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing is one of four British and Commonwealth memorials to the missing in the battlefield area of the Ypres Salient in Belgian Flanders. The memorial bears the names of 54,389 officers and men from United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16th August 1917 and who have no known grave. The names are engraved on the inner walls of the central Hall of Memory, to the sides of the staircases leading from the lower level to the upper exterior level, and on the walls of the north and south sides of the building. Every night at 8.00pm a moving ceremony takes place under the Menin Gate in Ypres when the Last Post, the traditional final salute to the fallen, is played by the buglers in honour of the memory of the soldiers of the former British Empire and its allies, who died in the Ypres Salient during the First World War. As we had not reached Ypres until around 10pm there had been time for little else except grabbing a good meal of steak & chips washed down by a solid Belgian beer so it was late morning before our three BMWs were back on the road. Our first destination for the day was a gathering of several hundred restored vehicles and encampment at Veghel some 240km away in the Netherlands which had been advertised under the banner ‘OMG2014’. Our route took us along the A14 towards and around Antwerp before we picked up the E34 towards Eindhoven.