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.]
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