Blogs from Champagne-Ardenne, France, Europe - page 19

One of our most anticipated parts of our holiday was the tour of the Pommery Champagne Winery. It fulfilled all our expectations and more! Arriving just on time, we were taken into a movie room where we were shown the history of the Pommery winery and how the Champagne is made. For a bit of a background - The pommery winery was started by Mr Pommery and one other fellow, but when Mr Pommery died just 2 years later, his daughter took over the company. It was unheard of in those days for women to be in business, but in just 20 years, she made a tiny winery into a mass producing huge success. Her key to her success was her inovated decision to use chalk caves under the city that were left by Romans ... read more

Today I visited the ancient city of Reims with a group of people from Sciences Po. Situated in the territory of Champagne (yes, it is the region where they make champagne) in the administrative territory of the Marne, Reims is only an hour-and-a-half bus ride from the heart of Paris, northeast of the city on the way to Belgium. It's ancient, built on the site of a Roman city, and once served as the regional capital for the Roman territory of Gaul. (Modern day France, Belgium, parts of Holland and Germany). You can still see the remnants of the Roman gate at the northern end of the city, which was once the largest gate in all of the Roman empire (if I understood the tour guide correctly...!) Upon our arrival we had a guided tour of ... read more

When does a four-hour drive take eight hours? When you’re traveling with a toddler, of course! We left for France at 9:00 a.m. and didn’t arrive until 5:00 p.m. The drive was pretty, though. Both Germany and France have lovely fall foliage right now. We had planned on driving straight to Reims, stopping for lunch, touring the cathedral, and then continuing on to Paris, but Katherine got cranky way before Reims, so we stopped for lunch near Verdun. We ate at another truck-stop over the autobahn. (Same kind as we stopped at in Belgium. It‘s a chain, but I forget the name of it.) The best thing about this stop was that Katherine’s kid’s meal came with a Sponge Bob (“Bob L’Eponge”) comic book in French. I’m not a big Sponge Bob fan, but it was ... read more

...and we're in Reims, France, about an hour northeast of Paris. It is a gorgeous little town of about 200,000, and it feels good to be here after three nights in Paris. Not that Paris wasn't a great scene, but Reims offers much of the same French urban experience -- charming sidewalk cafes, good wine, quaint shutter-and-wrought-iron-laden buildings, grandiose Gothic architecture, shopping -- with more hospitality and lower prices and without throngs of obnoxious tourists like ourselves. Plus, this is where they make Champagne with a capitol C. You don't save any money on it by coming to the source, but it's exciting to drive through small agricultural villages whose whole economy is devoted to creating New Year's Day headaches. Yesterday afternoon and today we broke out the Ford Fiesta (that's how we roll) for a ... read more