Amiens; Saturday, 20 June, 2026

As there was only one train every two hours to Amiens, I had to make a decision as to whether to get up really early to make the train just after 9am or have a bit of a lie in and catch the 11am train. As the 9am train was pulling out of the station I was settling in for a decent breakfast in the hotel having had a good night’s sleep.

I had a slow morning and then wandered over to Lille Flandres station to pick up the train down the Amines, arriving just after noon. From the station I had a wander through the city centre, stopping off at the Cathedral for a look around it.

With almost perfect timing I left the cathedral just as the Jules Verne Express, the city’s land train, was preparing to depart so I hopped on for a 70 minute tour around the key sights of the city centre, and to get a better idea of where everything is within the compact city centre. Whilst the tour was conducted only in French, the tour guides accent was clearly the right version of French as Google Translates live transcription was able, where the internet didn’t cut out, to keep up and make sense.

By the time we made it back to the cathedral check-in had opened for my hotel for the night, so I headed over there to drop off my stuff and quickly freshen up before heading back out into the city and having a bit more of a wander.

I spent a good couple of hours just wandering around the city centre taking in the views of this very attractive city, particularly in the area around the Somme River, which splits into multiple channels in the city, creating lots of small islands, helped by human intervention with many canals created to help feed the market gardens that have been built on many of the smaller islands in the channel.

With the Cathedral at the highest point on the land round here it’s also a great place to get a view of the cathedral rising above the buildings and river, many of those buildings in the Place du Don being bars, so naturally I had a quick pit stop for a pre-dinner drink, before heading closer into the centre of town for a bite to eat.

After dinner I headed back to the hotel to freshen up and was just about to head out to take some evening photos of the city when a spectacular thunderstorm passed over with heavy pounding rain going for about 10 minutes whilst I watched from the dry of the hotel reception. With the rain finally down to a very light drizzle I wandered out into town.

Of course I should have been wary of the rain easing after only 10 minutes and about 25 minutes later, thankfully whilst I was very close to some shelter, the pounding rain came back on, which I had to wait out under the overhang of a building on the Quai Belu for about 15 minutes, but after that bout of rain the air was noticeably less humid and clearer so I was pretty confident that was likely the end of the rain so I continued my evening wander.

I spent a good hour wandering around the city centre in the fading light, though a spectacular electrical storm was still raging up in the clouds, even if there was no thunder or rain which helped to create some really strange light effects in the sky.

After a while I headed back to the hotel to offload the latest photos and then turn in for the night, ready for what was likely to be an oppressively hot day the following day.