Not much help for your drive. My best advice is guided tour for WWII sites/beaches. You will never get the same experience from a guide book. Try Stuart Robertson. He is a former Battlebus guide who now does custom tours on his own. He is British, offers custom tours. You will not find a more knowledgeable guide. You can ask for a Canadian Highlights Tour. We had him for the American Highlights Tour Sept 09-so good we tried to get on a tour for the next day. http://www.normandybattletours.com/

The museum in Arromanches is well worth the visit. Video footage/documentary there not seen at any other of the D-Day/Normandy museums. Beautiful drive to Bayeux. What a trip! How about spending the night Honfluer or Le Havre?

There's a great deal more to this drive than the very time consuming D-Day visits.Ostend, though slightly industrialised, is also a pleasant fishing port with a considerable range of good fish restaurants.

It does get a bit boring from there to Calais, though the beaches immediately south of Calais make for terrific, if frequently blustery,walking. Your'e also close this point to the sites of Agincourt and the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

For the next 150 miles you're driving through London's most southerly suburb, though land values there are lower, journey times from central London faster and there are fewer French people than in London itself.There are frequent one-off WW2 museums, mostly advertised by handwritten posters along the coast road (as opposed to the parallel motorway).

Wimereux and Le Touquet contain great examples of early 20th-century architecture, and have famous for the quality of their light– which inspired several generations of 19th-century French painters. Boulogne, Etaples, Dieppe and Honfleur are pleasant fishing ports (Aux Pêcheurs d'Etaples is the most consistently enjoyable fish restaurant I know anywhere – including Grand Central in New York or Doyle's in Sydney). Any drive along this coast must include one Commonwealth War Grave Commission cemetery - and the one at Etaples (on the coast road from the north) is among the world's most chilling handful.

By far the prettiest place along this coast to overnight is Montreuil, about 10 kms inland from Etaples. A bit of a dirty weekend Mecca for Londoners on Friday and Saturday nights, but relatively easy to find accommodation the rest of the week – but important to pre-book.

I enjoy the coastal route. You should not miss Cap Gris Nez and Cap Blanc Nez just after the Eurotunnel. Cap Gris Nez is the closest point to England, which is clearly visible on certain days. The N1 is rarely close enough to the coast to see the sea, but there are numerous places where you can easily turn to see some of the beaches and villages, as well as the towns that flanneruk mentioned. It's good to have a detailed Michelin map for all this, but all points of interest and the various military cemeteries and monuments are clearly signposted.

In April the apple blossom will be gorgeous and it will be a picturesque drive. Honfleur on the coast is a lovely town. If you had another day and took a detour inland to Giverny you could visit Monet's garden which is beautiful in spring.

www.travelmagpie.com

Étaples Military Cemetery is likely to be a cornerstone of your itinerary - it's the largest Commonwealth War Grave in France and holds 11500 graves, 10% Canadian. Like all such places it's a sobering sight.
A visit there at the end of your day lends itself to an overnight stay at Montreuil, which as Flanneruk states is an attractive location with several decent eating options.

Dr D.

Wow: thanks for the amazing, detailed info. This will give me a LOT to research over the next few days. I have a friend who's loaning me a Michelin touring map, because looking online, I found them difficult to find, surprisingly.
gentnjd: thx, we have already booked 2 days of Cdn/US tours from Bayeux.
Kerouac: I just yesterday looked at your photos of Chartres with snow. After Bayeux, we head to Chartres (my 3rd visit, my parents 1st - so excited to show them). And thanks for tips re Cap Gris Nez etc. My mom's family is from the south of Eng. so she'll love that.
Thanks for everyone else's info re gravesights, stopovers.
I was thinking of a possible daytrip to Giverny (I was there about 10 yrs ago, but not in spring).

If your mother's originally English and quite old, you might consider rerouting overland from Bruges to Ypres (in English, though signposted in Flemish as Ieper) and on to St Omer and Boulogne.

For anyone British and old enough to have grown up in the shadow of WW1, Ypres in general, and its Menin Gate in particular, is THE WW1 monument, and much of the Bruges-St Omer route goes through or near names (like Armentieres) well known to that generation

WW1 sites rather lost salience to the next British generation, fixated on WW2 (your mother might like to see Dunkirk, signposted Dunkerque, if she's only just got her pension, though there's really nothing much to view there). Oddly, Ypres has re-emerged as a British pilgrimage site over the past 15-20 years: today's British schoolchildren probably know more about WW1 sites than about D-Day, and the hundreds of children on school outings around Ypres almost any day of the year now is itself an extraordinary sight.

In the fall of 2009, my father and I spent 9 days travelling in France and Belgium touring the WW1 and WW2 sites. We're Canadian as well, so I'm sure much of what we saw would be of interest to you. We started in Paris and drove up through Amiens, Arras and Albert, seeing most of the major Canadian sites (Beaumont-Hamel, Courcelette, etc) and some of general interest (Wellington Quarries, Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery, etc).

We then spent 1.5 days in Ypres, visiting most of the relative Canadian sites (Brooding soldier, Passchendaele memorial) and of course Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate. When you visit Menin Gate, go up the stairs to the top of it and walk along the path leading away from the gate (along the canal) for about 2km to a little CWGC right along the canal. My father said there wasn't a prettier little CWGC in all of France or Belgium, and we saw dozens.

After Ypres, we headed west along the coast to Dieppe, where we walked the infamous beach and gazed up on the chalk cliffs. Then two days in Caen, where we visited the Bayeux Cathedral, Caen War Museum, Juno Beach, the St. Laurent American War Cemetery, etc.

We continued on to Mont St Michel from Bayeux, and I'd highly recommend that. Then back east towards Paris, with a stop inb Chartres to see the famous cathedral.

If you need more specific sites, I have daily itineraries still saved on my computer, along with recommended websites. Major Holt's battlefield guides and maps were also invaluable and can be ordered through Chapters in Canada.

Elizabeth

Thx for the all the info, flaneruk. My mom's family is Eng, but she's from Toronto. Before Bruges, we will be staying in Ieper for 4 days (we're minimizing the number of hotel moves - so longer stays even in some smaller places). I've been to the In Flanders Field museum there and to Vimy - which we'll be visiting. Really looking forward to the evening ceremony at Menin Gate.

Elizabeth: these are fantastic suggestions. I just saw the Holt guides online yesterday, but now I'll buy them, thx. Your itinerary looks very similar to ours and I've already printed the directions/hours of the Peace Museum in Caen. Friends had told me that it was excellent. Our hotel in Bayeux does a shuttle to Mont St. Michel. I was there on my honeymoon. Were the walks uphill ok for your father? My parents are both 80.

Hi Toronto Sue,

It sounded like your trip would be very much like ours was!The Holt guides are great, especially the Normandy one, because they have individual plans within tailored to British v Canadian v American travellers. I found them to be very helpful, though I still printed out google map directions and used my GPS to find sites. A GPS will help immensely on your trip if you have one. Just buy the France/Belgium maps and input the co-ordinates for each site. Wikipedia has the GPS co-ordinates for most of the sites we visited, so we didn't even have to have street addresses.

For MSM, my father was 63 when we went and fairly able-bodied. The stairs are a steep climb right up to the top, so we took a rest halfway through. If they're patient and fairly mobile, I think they'll be ok. If not, they can always enjoy the ambience in a cafe. Honestly, I got more out of seeing MSM from the distant parking lot than I did from being inside. It's an imposing structure and it was the favourite place my father visited.

Do you have any specific "must do" sites in mind yet? When you're in Caen, you should also do the castle in Caen, Chateau Ducal. It's about 1000 years old and very impressive.

Hi Elizabeth. I'll think about MSM - don't know if it would work, but could go for the view if our time works out. I'll leave it to my folks to decide. Thanks for info on Chateau Ducal. And for GPS. I don't have one but maybe should buy one for the trip.
I would love your daily itineraries if you do have them handy. Email is: torontosue634@gmail.com

Done!
Elizabeth

You don't have to go all the way up to the top to appreciate Mont Saint Michel. But it's great if you can drag your way up all those steps to the abbey (and then a whole bunch more steps inside the abbey before you work your way down), but it is not obligatory. However, I would really recommend giving it a try -- after all you can go up as slowly as you want with as much resting time as you want. Nobody is pushing you from behind, like, say, the towers of Notre Dame.

Anybody who makes it all the way up is totally enthralled by the things to see.

My husband and I spent a couple of days at MSM on our honeymoon. We went to a mass, which was lovely, but my favourite part of the abbey was the cloisters. We sat there for a long time and have beautiful photos of pink hydrangeas inside the walls. I don't know what the town is like now (this was 30 yrs ago), but that was in high summer and the junky stuff for sale throughout the town -- pushy vendors -- made the town feel so tacky; so the abbey was a true breath of air and quiet.

You might want to look at my trip report on Ghent, Normandy and Birttany; just click on my name to find it.

Vastérival was a great garden to visit, but since the owner died, I do not know if tours are still available.

This set of pictures fits within your intended itinerary:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca/sets/72157624436592493/

Michael: your pictures are beautiful and make me want to leave right now. I love the pictures of the poppies especially. And, the half timber buildings are amazing. Thanks for sending the link. I've made note of a number of the names from where the photos are taken.

The pictures are geo-tagged so that if you click on the red dot on the map, you will see where each pictures was taken.

Michael: Thanks, I'll do that. Per earlier advice from lizardsoccer, I've bought a GPS to take along with me.

Elizabeth: I bought the gps through the link you sent me. Checked reviews and prices in other places, and that was the best price. I'll have it by Monday. Thx again for that advice.