Flanders Fields Remembrance Day Trip from Bruges

After meeting your guide, you will board the bus for a bus ride of about an hour to the German cemetery, where thousands of fallen soldiers lie buried. Here you will understand the magnitude of the sacrifice and the memorials that hold their names.

Next, you'll approach an original section of World War I trenches, where you can enter the dirt and concrete corridors that protected the combatants, and visit the Reflective Soldier's Monument, erected in memory of the 2,000 Canadians who suffered the first gas attack. Nearby stands the strategic Hill 60, the scene of heavy fighting and tunnelling by the Royal Engineers.

The centrepiece of the tour is the Flanders Fields Museum (admission included) in Ypres. In its interactive rooms you will hear moving accounts from those who lived through four years of trench warfare and see period artefacts, uniforms, weapons and visual testimonies that recreate the grim reality on the Western Front.

After a brief stop for a snack, you'll head to Passchendaele to visit Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world, and then on to Essex Farm Cemetery, where Dr John McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields". At each location, your guide will tell you anecdotes and little-known facts that connect the past with the living memory of the region.

The day ends back in Ypres, with free time for a light dinner. In the evening you will attend the Last Trumpet Blowing Ceremony at the Menin Gate, a solemn act that has been repeated every night since 1929 to honour the fallen soldiers discharged in Flanders.