France - Pas-de-Calais - Sangatte - Blériot-Plage Sangatte

As part of my collection I like to collect normal datestamps next to the special postmarks and country envelopes. France has issued a lot of stamps that are connected to a specific place.

In 2009 France issued an air mail stamp for the 100th anniversary of the crossing of the English Channel by aviator Louis Blériot on 25 July 1909. The 2 euro stamp was designed by Jame's Prunier and engraved by Yves Beaujard. It was printed in sheetlets of ten stamps.

Louis Charles Joseph Blériot (1 July 1872 - 1 August 1936) was a French aviator, inventor, and engineer. He developed the first practical headlamp for cars and established a profitable business manufacturing them, using much of the money he made to finance his attempts to build a successful aircraft. Blériot was the first to use a combination of hand/arm-operated joystick and foot-operated rudder control, that is in use to the present day, for the basic format of aerodynamic aircraft control systems. Blériot was also the first to make a working, powered, piloted monoplane. In 1909 he became world-famous for making the first airplane flight across the English Channel, winning the prize of £ 1.000 offered by the Daily Mail newspaper. He was the founder of a successful aircraft manufacturing company.

I sent the envelope with the Blériot stamp to the post office Blériot-Plage Sangatte. Blériot flew from the beach at Sangatte to Dover. In those days the village was called Les Baraques, but on 9 August 1936 the municipal council of Sangatte decided to change the name to Blériot-Plage.

I sent the envelope with the Blériot stamp to the post office with a polite letter and it returned in 40 days. Apparently they took more than a month to decide to postmark the envelope. After they did that, it returned in two days.

Date sent: 4 May 2017

Date postmark: 11 June 2017

Date received: 13 June 2017

Number of days: 40

Envelope in collection: 162.