Paris, Normandy & Brussels — The Remembrance Trail

𝗦𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗦 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗘𝗡𝗝𝗢𝗬. 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗜𝗦 𝗢𝗡𝗘 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗥𝗬 𝗛𝗢𝗠𝗘! 🥂

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀. 𝗦𝗶𝘅 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘀. 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀, 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿.

𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗶𝘁. 𝗟𝗲𝘁 𝘂𝘀 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗲.

𝗜𝗧 𝗕𝗘𝗚𝗜𝗡𝗦 𝗢𝗡 𝗔 𝗚𝗢𝗟𝗙 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗦𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗟𝗗 𝗛𝗔𝗦 𝗪𝗔𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗪𝗢 𝗬𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗦 𝗧𝗢 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬 𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗜𝗡 ⛳️

Stand on the first tee at Le Golf National and you know exactly where you are. The mounding rises around you like an amphitheatre. Somewhere out to the right waits the closing stretch, the water, the grandstand hill, the ground where Europe won the 2018 Ryder Cup and where Olympic gold was decided in 2024.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁. 🗓️

The Albatros closed in October 2024 and stayed shut for two full years while the Grand Paris Metro was tunnelled beneath its boundary and the course was rebuilt around it. Holes 4, 5 and 6 completely redesigned. Greens reshaped. Every playing surface converted to new turf. It reopened this month and, within weeks, hosted the Open de France to prove itself.

Which means you will be walking a golf course that is simultaneously the most famous in Europe and one of the newest. Fairways barely touched. Greens still finding their first-season pace. Bunkers with edges you could cut yourself on. Our tee times are secured. Very few Australians will have played this version of the Albatros. And when you reach the 18th, water hard down the left and the whole natural grandstand watching, you'll understand precisely why the players still talk about that Sunday the way they do.

𝗔 𝗗𝗔𝗬 𝗜𝗡 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗜𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗧 𝗕𝗘𝗟𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗦 𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗟𝗬 𝗧𝗢 𝗬𝗢𝗨 🇫🇷

The next morning is yours.

You could give it to the Musée d'Orsay, or the Tuileries, or a long unhurried lunch in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, because Paris in late May is a city built for exactly that. You could climb to Sacré-Cœur and watch the whole thing lie down beneath you.

Or you could go and listen to the most distinctive sound in sport. Roland-Garros is on while we're in town, and for those who'd like to, there's the option to attend. The scuff of leather on crushed brick. The long patient rallies only clay demands. Twenty thousand people going silent at once and then erupting together.

Tell us early if this appeals to you!

𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗗 𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗡𝗦 𝗪𝗘𝗦𝗧, 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗔𝗜𝗥 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘𝗦 📸

Normandy announces itself before you arrive. The light softens. Hedgerows close in. Apple orchards, cream, cider, half-timbered farmhouses standing since before anyone thought to write things down.

We stop at Honfleur, the port town that broke the Impressionists open. Tall slate-fronted houses lean over the Vieux Bassin and double themselves in the water. The Church of Sainte-Catherine was built entirely of wood by local shipwrights, who knew how to build boats and simply built one upside down. A glass of cider at a table on the cobbles, a group lunch, and then on.

We settle for four nights at Deauville's Hôtel du Golf, a grand Belle Époque hotel high on the hill above the resort, looking down over the racecourse and the wide grey shine of the Channel. This is old France at its most elegant, all striped parasols and boardwalk and salt in the air. The Deauville course rolls out from the hotel door, a Tom Simpson design threading through orchards and open pasture with the sea in view from half the holes. Wide, generous, walkable. After Le Golf National, that is exactly the point.

And then there is Étretat.

If you play one golf course in your life for the view alone, make it this one. It sits on the clifftop of the Alabaster Coast, high above the water, looking down on the chalk arches and the great needle of rock Monet painted again and again and never quite got out of his system. Gulls glide below you. The turf is thin and springy. The wind comes off the Channel with nothing at all in its way.

You will lose a ball. You will not care in the slightest.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗕𝗘𝗔𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗦 ☀️

There is a morning on this tour when nobody says much on the coach.

It begins at Pointe du Hoc, where the cliffs still stand torn and cratered and the concrete lies split open exactly where it fell. Rangers climbed that, under fire, with ropes.

Then the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, above Omaha Beach, where the ground opens out into row upon row of white marble aligned so precisely they seem to shift as you walk past. Below, the sand runs long and flat and unremarkable. On any other day it would be a place you'd bring the grandchildren. Then you look back up at the bluffs the way they had to, and the arithmetic of it lands all at once.

It isn't the scale that gets most people. It's the ages on the headstones. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-two.

We give this day the time it deserves. No rushing. Just the space to stand there in the wind, and afterwards a long lunch together in the Normandy countryside, which is when people start to talk.

𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗗 𝗧𝗢 𝗕𝗥𝗨𝗦𝗦𝗘𝗟𝗦, 𝗪𝗘 𝗙𝗜𝗡𝗗 𝗢𝗨𝗥 𝗢𝗪𝗡 🇧🇪

This is the part most travellers don't see coming.

At Villers-Bretonneux, in the fields of the Somme, there is a schoolyard. It was rebuilt after the war with pennies donated by Australian schoolchildren, and above it are carved three words the town has never once let fade: never forget Australia. They still mean it. The children there are still taught it.

Above the village stands the Australian National Memorial, and on its walls are the names of more than ten thousand Australians who fell in France and were never found. Not buried. Not recovered. Just names, cut into stone, on a ridge in a foreign country.

Inside the Franco-Australian Museum, housed in that same school, are the letters home. The handwriting is what does it. Ordinary boys from Ballarat and Bundaberg and Broken Hill, writing to their mothers about the weather.

You will have heard the Last Post a hundred times at home. You have not heard it standing there.

We take our time here too, and we eat together afterwards. It's the right way to do it.

𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗡, 𝗚𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗟𝗬, 𝗕𝗘𝗟𝗚𝗜𝗨𝗠 𝗚𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗦 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗢𝗟𝗙 𝗕𝗔𝗖𝗞 ⛳️

Three more rounds, and every one of them is worth the trip on its own.

Royal Antwerp was founded in 1888 and remains Belgium's oldest club and its number one ranked course. Willie Park Jr laid out the original ground; Tom Simpson reworked it in 1930 into what it is now, a serene wooded heathland of sandy soil, silver birch, purple heather and bunkers with shapes only a Golden Age architect would dare to draw. It is quiet, beautiful, and almost nobody outside Belgium gets to play it.

Royal Bercuit is the only course in the country Robert Trent Jones Sr ever built, secluded among rolling hills and ancient trees in the Walloon Brabant. Golf Château de La Tournette finishes things off, wide and grand through old woodland just outside the city.

Five nights at the Hotel Amigo, a short walk from the Grand-Place - a square so beautiful that Victor Hugo simply gave up and called it the most beautiful in the world. At night the guildhalls light up gold and it stops you where you stand. Then the serious business begins: which chocolate shop, which waffle, which beer, which bowl of mussels.

𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗜𝗙 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗗𝗢𝗡'𝗧 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬 𝗚𝗢𝗟𝗙, 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗥 𝗪𝗔𝗦 𝗕𝗨𝗜𝗟𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗧𝗢𝗢 📸

Not as an afterthought. As a parallel programme.

A hands-on cooking class in Paris with a local chef. A farm-to-table day in a Norman kitchen working with Camembert, orchard apples and coastal seafood. A custom perfume workshop in Cherbourg where you learn to compose a scent and bottle your own. A guided tasting in the cellars of Distillerie Père Magloire, home of Normandy's finest Calvados. A day in Antwerp's Grote Markt and diamond quarter. A chocolate workshop where you temper, mould and fill your own pralines, and take them home.

Every sightseeing day - Honfleur, the D-Day beaches, Villers-Bretonneux, Brussels - is shared by everyone. And the non-golfer fare sits barely below the golfer fare, because the programme is genuinely that good.

𝗦𝗢 - 𝗪𝗛𝗬 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗧 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗗𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗜𝗦 𝗢𝗡𝗘?

Because of the golf you cannot get anywhere else. A reborn Ryder Cup and Olympic course in its first season back. A clifftop in Normandy that Monet couldn't leave alone. Belgium's number one, hidden in the pines.

Because of what sits underneath it. Most golf tours give you courses and a coach. This one gives you the beaches, the ridgelines and the names carved into a wall above a French village, and it hands you back a piece of who we are. Because it lines up once.

𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗬 | 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗘𝗧𝗟𝗬 | 𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗛𝗢𝗠𝗘 𝗗𝗜𝗙𝗙𝗘𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗧.

𝗩𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆, 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗵𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 👉🏼 https://www.gogolfing.com.au/paris-normandy-brussels , call +61 7 5508 2250 or visit GoGolfing.com.au