If you’re from the UK, you’ll know that this Sunday 8 November 2009 is Remembrance Sunday, when we honour and remember the living and dead who fought for Britain in both the First and Second world wars as well as more recent conflicts such as Korea, The Falklands, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the First World War ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the 11 November is remembered as Armistice Day and on the Sunday closest to this date Remembrance events are held in town centres all around the country, including the one attended by the Royal family at the Cenotaph in London.

If you have any relatives who served in the armed forces or even fought in the two world wars, you may be interested to hear about the Royal British Legion’s travel arm, called Poppy Travel that organises pilgrimages and tours to key battlefields in Europe and all over the world. You can visit the beaches where the Allied Forces landed in Normandy on D-day, the landing sites in Gallipoli in Turkey, as well as Singapore, Korea and South Africa.

My husband and his father, both of whom served in the armed forces recently took a trip to Arnhem in the Netherlands on a trip  which relived the events of Operation Market Garden. You may remember it through the film, ‘A Bridge too far’ in which 10,000 men parachuted into Arnhem in a push to capture the bridges of Holland’s Great rivers and enable an advance into Germany.

With an experienced and well-informed guide who accompanied the group, they found out more about the brave but doomed defence of the Arnhem bridge, saw a commemorative parachute drop to re-enact the actual events and attended a service of Remembrance at the Oosterbeek War Graves. Last year they went on a similar battlefield tour to Waterloo in Belgium, the scene of the famous battle in 1815 against Napoleon’s army.

At some of these Battlefield sites, you can easily organise your own day trip, as there are interesting museums and visitor centres. However, there were a number of things which made the tour with Poppy Travel a much more meaningful experience. Firstly, the guides on these tours are extremely knowledgeable, usually with a military background who know not only the detail of the battles itself but also their whole historical context. Secondly, these tours are often pilgrimages for those who were themselves participants in the battles and are visiting the sites again with sons or daughters. On the recent trip to Arnhem, several of the group were in their 80s and had fought at Arnhem, including one old soldier who had been captured there by the German SS and spent the remaining 10 months in a prisoner of war camp.

This is not so much a holiday as an enriching travel experience, and perhaps not one for the average backpacker or beach lover. But if you have a family connection, or want to share this experience with an older relative who has some personal experience of these events, it could be a very rewarding journey.

Photos by Dog Company and Faceme