Daily Archives: August 12, 2007

August 12 –

Ah, France on a Sunday…. it’s so quiet…. deathly quiet…. so we sorta had to have breakfast in the hotel this morning because there was nothing else open!  So we loaded up the utilitarian van and found our way out of Dijon.  We would have liked to spend some time driving down the Wine Road but it headed south and we were going north…. to Reins, the heart of Champagne!

Let me describe a Sunday drive on a highway in northern France… we were surrounded by Belgians and Brits with overloaded station wagons and mini-vans heading home from their holidays.  The Dutch were on the move too but they seemed to all be either driving RVs or towing caravans!  I think we only saw 3 cars with French plates the whole 300 kilometers we were on the road today!  Not that we’re ones to talk – our car has Swiss plates!

We sorely missed Helga, or any satnav system, as we attempted to find our hotel in Reims today.  Mostly because it turned out not to actually be in Reims but in a suburb…. D’oh!  I hate it when I forget to read the fine print!  A very nice lady at the tourist information office set us straight though and we found it with little trouble.  Unfortunately, it’s really not near anything that you can walk to so after checking in and unloading the bags (through the window – we’re on the ground floor!), we headed back downtown to see the sights.

We found a lovely little place still serving lunch at 3 p.m. and discovered what Croques are in Champagne:  open faced grilled cheese sandwiches… YUM!  Frank had his with tomato and I had mine with ham.  Duncan experienced the French version of a club sandwich and learned a lesson himself:  hard-boiled eggs don’t fit well on sandwiches if they are just cut in half!   Nevertheless, we had our sustenance and it was time to figure out what the town had to offer.  One guess:  champagne!

We walked a little ways from the town center to get to the wine cellars of G.H. Mumm for a tour and some tasting… well for us, the kids had to pass.  We caught the last English tour of the day and learned how this fine house has been making champagne for 170 years.  They are the official champagne of Formula 1 racing so the next time you see a grand prix, you’ll see their champagne being sprayed all over the podium. They have 2.5 MILLION bottles aging in cellars that cover 25 kilometers of tunnels.  It was pretty impressive!  We learned lots of stuff about the various fermentations and saw the riddling racks where a small percentage of their product is still riddled by hand; riddling is the fine art of getting the sediment into the neck of the bottle so it can be easily removed before the finally bottling.  Then it was time to taste!  We had tickets to try the basic offering, the Cordon Rouge, as well as a single year vintage from 1999.  We could actually taste the difference – it was really neat to be able to see and smell the difference in the two champagnes.  We bought a half-bottle to have later since there’s no way to get it home…. stupid 3 ounce rule….

Thus fortified, we wandered to the cathedral:  Notre Dame de Reims – I told you every French city had one!  After lighting a tall candle this time (10!), we learned about the history of this interesting building.  It was built on the site where it is believed that Clovis, the first king to unite the Frankish people, was crowned in *496*!!  Of course, no cathedral existed for another 400 years…  This building has a fascinating history starting in the 12th century when construction began.  It is where 25 kings of France have been crowned including Charles VII who was pretty much dragged there by Jeanne d’Arc.  It sustained damage in WWI but not much in WWII and has some beautiful stained glass windows by Marc Chagall.

It was now time for the evening meal and we found another lovely place where we got to sit outside and have yummy food but it was spoiled by a nearby table where a large Italian or Spanish man decided to have a cigar during our dinner.  I’ve adjusted, a bit, to the ever present cigarette smoke here in Europe but cigar smoke makes me really ill.  So we finished up quickly, skipping desert :-(, and headed back to the hotel to snack on Swiss chocolate and prepare for tomorrow’s adventure:  Brussels.

/san/

[Pedometer:  17,401 or about 8.5 miles, a fair amount of which was clocked in cellars 14 meters below the surface.]

August 11 –

So today we prepare to bid Auf Weidersein to Zurich and move on to the French countryside.  We breakfasted, packed up and loaded up our new rental car; alas, our rental car karma had given out and we got exactly what we paid for:  a Volkswagon Caddy.  It’s a bare bones mini-van with no extras especially no satellite navigation system so I actually have to pay attention to where we are and figure out how to get to where we are going!

So thanks to Google maps, we find our way out of Zurich and onto the road to Dijon.  It is grey and cloudy and we are convinced that we are in for another soggy day in France.  We got there about 3.5 hours later and realized the downside to Google maps:  if you don’t wind up on the road they recommend, you have no reference how to get back to the suggested route!  We found the hotel eventually and got the bags unloaded.  The sun had broken through the clouds and it appeared that France was trying to redeem herself.  But we couldn’t enjoy it immediately because we had family business:  laundry!

As it would happen, there is a laundromat right around the corner from our hotel (coincidence?) so we start a couple of loads and head of to grab some lunch.  Now we are back in less familiar, more French territory where a smile and “Bitte” don’t buy anything!  Dijon may not be the back woods but it isn’t so cosmopolitan that we can expect everyone to speak English because they don’t!  We navigated the menu at the brasserie with no major problems (ham in mustard sauce – yum!) and then checked in on the laundry. 

After putting the clean clothes in the dryer, we started our daily wanderings to see what this city had to offer.  It is a very old town with lots of ancient sandstone buildings and tons of churches!  We found our way into Notre Dame de Dijon – I think every French city has a Notre Dame – where I lit a candle for my mom to make up for the lack of candles in the Swiss churches (candles: 9).  We retrieved the laundry and had our daily ice cream before doing some more wandering.

One thing that is really neat about Dijon is that there is a marked walking tour of the city.  The Owl  (“La Chouette”) is a symbol for the city and it appears on the pillars of Notre Dam and there are little owl plaques set into the sidewalks to take you past the major tourist attractions.  We figured this out halfway through and proceeded to have some aim to our wandering which took us past many other churches – including one where a wedding was just wrapping up and we got to see the bride and groom emerge.  It was really neat!  We stopped in a few shops and snapped lots of pictures of this really neat town.

We found a lovely little restaurant where there was an English menu posted – except, of course, that the waiter himself didn’t speak English.  Luckily I knew the French word for egg or I would have gotten escargot for a starter!  We think we have found all the missing children from Zurich because they were all in the square in Dijon tonight.  We enjoyed all three courses and a litre of the local wine and then headed back for a quiet Saturday night.

/san/

[Pedometer:  18,681 or about 9 miles over cobblestones.  Not bad considering we spent half the day in the car…]