As we could read on the official website and in guidebooks, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial is about 10 km north of the town of Arras, where we stayed for a few days in July. However, almost all the instructions we encountered (and that official distance) are for driving there, not for riding a bike - and we had no intention of riding on the N17 motorway (or worse yet, on the Autoroute) to get there.
Before leaving home, I purchased the Michelin #301 "Pas-de-Calais, Somme" Local map from a specialized map store - so we knew that there were other local "D" roads available to get to the memorial. (Helpful Hint - unless you're a true map fanatic and need to see the map well ahead of time, wait and buy it there in a bookstore - much cheaper at 4 Euros rather than the $14.95 Cdn I paid! You can always look at Via Michelin beforehand to get a sense of the area, and even print out a map from a specific search). The scale of the local Michelin map, 1/150000 was too large to get an idea though of how to get out of Arras to get on to any of these "D" roads - and the inset of Arras at larger scale was only a bit more helpful as it really only included the centre-ville area.
So, once in Arras, we went to the local tourist office located in the Town Hall. While we did get another local map of the centre of town, the workers there couldn't really help us with planning a bike route to Vimy - their best advice was "you don't want to go on the Motorway" and when we pointed to some of the smaller roads on our map they agreed but didn't give us any assistance as to how to get to those roads or which might be the best choice.
Therefore, we set off by walking our bikes over the cobbles of the Grand'Place north of our hotel, then rode west on the Rue Méaulens to the roundabout at the Place de Tchecoslovaquie. From there, we rode along the Rue Michelet to the north-east - but our larger-scale maps pretty much ended at that point.
On the local Michelin map, we knew that we wanted to turn north and head towards Roclincourt, but unfortunately the map didn't give any sort of name or number for this road. There were directional signs to various places, but mostly for things like the church (L'église) or the town hall (La Mairie) or how to get to the Motorway, and didn't help us much. So, we ended up going probably 3 km out of our way to the east, ending up at St. Laurent-Blangy, before we saw a bus stop with a map where I was able to determine that we did in fact want to turn north at the sign for the St. Nicholas Mairie.
We were a little bit concerned as we approached the motorway that we were in fact going to go over it rather than end up on it (as it was a bit of a detour rather than straight across), but once on the other side and heading north again we were reassured by signs that pointed towards Roclincourt (the next village we were aiming for on the map).
All was well until we got to Thélus, where once again the lack of a specific larger-scale local map was a problem - we got a good exploration of Thélus in several directions, including east to the N17 motorway and out northwest to a dead-end before we took what looked like a relatively main road northward that was labelled to the cemetery. This did take us north-west like we wanted, ending up at the N17 with the apparent road into the memorial a bit south on the opposite side of the N17. (and looking back at Google Earth/Google Maps afterwards, we somehow missed the "Rue de Vimy" which was what we wanted - I think we were on the Rue des Abouts and Rue de 19 Mars instead, before ending up on the Rue de Vimy).
Unfortunately, this road was blocked off to traffic, with instructions (in French) about how to detour around back to all the major roads we were trying to avoid in order to get to the Memorial from the opposite direction. It was slightly concerning that in English the sign only mentioned road construction, but in French it mentioned work being done for undetonated explosives and how dangerous it would be to go this way. On the other hand, it would also be quite dangerous to ride in busy traffic on the motorway! There was a mountain biker who had lifted his bike over the barrier and rode in just before we got there, and as he didn't come back (and we didn't hear any loud explosions), we decided to go this route we'd planned. There was only one area where there was some construction being done a bit off the road, and the workers waved to us as we rode by - lol. So much for my anxieties about being chased away by security or something like that.
The bonus was that at the end, we had a lovely tree-lined boulevard all to ourselves with no cars allowed (see photos below). We were happy to see the official Canadian government sign signifying we'd reached the official Memorial area, near the trenches/tunnels area of the Memorial site. We were able to ride our bikes up to the main memorial area, where we locked them to a pole in the parking lot. (We think that the security guard offered to watch them for us such that we didn't need to lock them, but we weren't secure enough with our French to be sure so we locked up anyway). Back near the trenches/tunnels area (where the official Visitor Centre is), we were able to lock up again at an actual bike rack in the parking lot.
On the way back to Arras, this time instead we went south to Neuville-St. Vaast, east along the D49 to Thélus (probably how we should have gone from Thélus had we known the other road would be closed), then back south through Roclincourt to Arras and kind of randomly along a few one-way streets to our hotel (tackling the cobbles this time rather than walking - ouch ;-) ).
Total time: going = 1.5 hours, 21.3 km; coming back = 45 minutes, 15.4 km.
Route summary:
-from Arras Grand'Place, NW on Rue Méaulens, then NE on Rue Michelet/D41, then N on Rue Raoul Briquet (according to Google Maps, just where Rue Michelet turns into Rue Anatole France).
-turn left when you get to the N17, go across it, then right again and N on Route de Roclincourt/Rue d'Arras.
-once at Thélus, probably best to go left/W on the Grande Rue/D49 to Neuville-St.Vaast to avoid the potentially-still-closed road we took.
-from Neuville-St. Vaast, go north on the D55/Route du Canada (is that obvious or what?) and there were even signs from this direction directing you to the Canadian Memorial, so should have no problems finding it from here.
(I tried to plot our routes on images I saved from Google Earth, seeing as our Garmin Edge didn't seem to work that day to plot it automatically for us - sorry for the wobbles).
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