All you can see is Champagne…

The 30 degree heat overnight makes the sleeping somewhat uncomfortable in our non air-conditioned rooms but never the less we manage to get a few hours in.Breakfast this morning is not the usual Petit Dejuner at the ground level of the hotel but taken in our rooms using the last of our Swedish bought food. Some bread, Juice and cheese. We need to finish all our food before we return home. The sniffers dogs at Sydney airport would love us otherwise. The sausage I bought in the Swedish village of Färila a week and a few posts ago still shows no sign of deterioration and is finished in a flash. Salted and heavily smoked it is known to withstand the harshest of climate conditions.

Today we’re doing a tour of the Champagne-Ardennes district. This is the only place in the world where every drop of sparkling wine produced is allowed to the get the label Champagne. First off we drive to the small village of Hautvillers to show Salme the tomb of Dom Perignon, who made some very important contributions to the production and quality of Champagne, what a treat for him to do all that tasting! The village itself is the postcard perfect place of a tiny French village with the narrow streets, flowers in every window, a baker, a Brassiere and an old church. Well worth the visit for anyone who’s considering a visit to France and the Champagne region.

Next we follow the “ Champagne Route Tourism” through tiny villages and every grain of chalk filled dirt has a champagne vine growing on it. Famous Champagne brands like Dom Perignon, Moet & Chandon, Mumm, Veuve Cliquot flashes past us as we slowly make our way north east towards Verzy.  In Verzy we take a walk through the National Park to inspect some beech trees which were thought to be cursed by divine intervention in medieval times before 20th century science arrived and concluded the strange looking trees were caused by genetic mutation.

All tree’d out we move on and next stop is the village of Verzenay which has a wine museum, which we ignore, but we do admire some great views of the champagne growing countryside. Check out the full panorama photo!

It’s past lunch time and we need to head towards Paris to make the deadline for our car drop off time. The French motorways are very good with a 130 km/h speed limit but as always the roads have to be funded and the road toll stations are frequent but if it can save some time we don’t mind to pay a couple of Euros here and there. Our Tom-tom GPS navigation device really comes into a class of it’s own as we get nearer Paris. Since it receives live updates of the traffic situation along our route we get the optimal travel instructions to reach our goal. Road works, congestions and accidents are all avoided and with the superb driving skills of Yvonne we navigate the streets of Paris with ease and reach our car drop off point right on time.

We sell the car back to Citroen and make no profit  nor a loss either…. A Taxi takes us through the busy peak hour traffic of Paris to our hotel in Montparnasse. We find to our delight it’s air conditioned and in the 37 degree heat it certainly makes life a lot more pleasant. A few wines later we head out for dinner at a nearby brassiere. Tomorrow we’re catching the bus to the Charles De Gaulle airport and it will be an early departure so we have and early night once we’ve finished the last bottle of wine.