Travel Blog – 22nd April 2023

Champagne!

We left Paris and picked up a car to start our road trip. First stop: Rheims, in the heart of the Champagne region.

Rheims is a beautiful, quaint old town with historic buildings everywhere you look. We didn’t stop long to admire the architecture, however: There was champagne to be dranken…drinked…drunk! We hot-tailed it straight out to Ruinart for a cellar door tour and tasting. They kept us waiting for the bubbly, however, while they took us through the history of Ruinart. They are the oldest champagne house in France, having been making the good stuff since 1729! The cellar door is situated over 8 kilometres of underground storage tunnels. These tunnels were originally chalk mines but were repurposed to store champagne during the ageing process. It is a constant 12 deg Celsius in the tunnels with 90 percent humidity, making it perfect conditions for ageing champagne.

After ascending the 50,000 stairs back to the surface, we entered the tasting room and sampled their beautiful champagnes. This was a special privilege, since it is almost impossible to get Ruinart in Australia anymore. Only 5% of their limited production is sent to Australia, making it as rare as hen’s teeth.

We stopped in an old cafe for a coffee and Ian ordered a piece of apple pie. The waiter explained that it was the best apple pie in the world, and he was right! It was a massive, thick piece with loads of apple on it and the crust was super delicious! We all helped Ian eat it. He was very grateful.

The next morning, we took a stroll around the historic Rheims. This town has a lot of history, being occupied by Gaul, then the Romans, and eventually suffering under a siege by the English in 1360. Joan of Arc led the armies to Rheims to defeat the English and free the city and the cathedral. Charles VII was then crowned in the cathedral, which was used as the official coronation venue for all kings of France thereafter. There is a statue of Joan of Arc in front of the impressive Gothic cathedral.

Around lunchtime the rain started, but we had another historic site to check out so we grabbed our umbrellas and braved the wet weather to traipse through Rheims to the Porte de Mars. We were excited to see this site, because it was built by the Romans in the 3^rd century AD and is the widest arch in the Roman world. So, after a 20 minute walk through the rain, we arrived to find that it is under restoration and completely covered up!

Our dejection didn’t last long, once we grabbed a delicious quiche each from the local boulangerie and ate them in our apartment. We then found a champagne bar in front of the cathedral and sampled a couple of glasses of their finest. Sipping champagne in Champagne: Life doesn’t get any better than that.

We bundled into the car after this and drove out to the cellar door of Veuve Clicquot. A similar experience to Ruinart the day before, we toured their chalk cellars and then enjoyed a tasting of their champagnes. Learning about the history of the champagne house was fascinating. Madame Clicquot was an incredible woman. Widowed at 26, she took over the champagne house amid protests from the locals, who didn’t want a woman running a champagne house. She ignored them and forged on, going on to invent the riddling technique and champagne rosé. She was also one of the first to pay her workers sick pay and is now revered in Rheims.

The next day we checked out and drove to a small town in the Loire Valley called Chartres. This was only meant to be a one night stopover to break up the drive, but turned out to be a highlight of the trip so far. Chartres is a charming little ancient town of 38,000 people, but boasts one of the most impressive cathedrals I’ve ever seen. The choir is surrounded by carvings in white stone that took hundreds of years to make and runs for 100 metres in a semi circle. The four layers of sculpture are 6 metres high and took 300 years to make.

Chartres also boasts a stained glass museum, which kept Ian and I amused for a while. We even convinced the receptionist to take us into their workshop, where a bunch of people were making stained glass. A South African lady named Cheryl told us all about the process. It was fascinating, although she was a bit nervous whenever Ian or I pointed something out on her project, grabbing both of our hands and moving them away from her work. Apparently, if we touched any one piece, she’d have to take hours to re-do it. I can’t imagine why she didn’t trust us.

That night we went out for dinner next to the cathedral and had a scrumptious meal. We chose a bottle of Bordeaux with our dinner and it was delicious. A table of Americans on a tour sat next to us and were debating which wine to choose, so Ian leant over and gave them our bottle to try! It happened so quickly that none of us had time to rugby-tackle him to the ground before he handed it over!

Lidia ordered Tarte Tatin, which was magnificent and Carmel and Ian shared massive profiteroles filled with ice cream and lathered in runny chocolate.

After dinner we went outside and witnessed one of the most memorable sights all of us had ever seen. At 9:30 each night between April and October, Chartres projects a light show onto 26 of their historical sights around the city. We were mesmerised by the light show on the cathedral, which went for over half an hour and was truly incredible. I would recommend anyone to go to Chartres just to witness this wonder. There were plenty of oohs and aahs coming from the crowd, and refreshingly there wasn’t a lot of people there.

We could have spent a lot more time in Chartres, but sadly we had to leave the next morning. Happily, we were due to meet up with Rob and Caitlynne again in Vitre, on the way to Rennes. We stopped in Vitre and admired the chateau, which unfortunately was closed, but we did enjoy a lovely lunch there and the old town was beautiful, with many timber houses.

Immediately after lunch we continued on to Rennes, the capital city of Brittany, where we would stay for the next 3 nights. This was a much larger town of 220,000 people. They have been in the news recently as one of the hotspots for rioting following Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise the pension age in France. They firebombed a Mercedes Benz in the main square and have smashed all of the electronic signs and bus stops along the main avenue. Many of the shops and hotels have boarded up their windows to prevent the rioters from smashing them. This, unfortunately, detracts from the beauty of the city, making it look more like a war zone.

We took a day trip out to Fougeres the next day to see their fortress. Built in the 11th century, it is an impressive structure, taking you back to the medieval period where armies sieged the fortress.

For lunch, we sampled our first gallette. Brittany is famous for crepes and gallettes, a gallette being a savoury crepe folded in at the sides. They were all super delicious and we paired them with apple cider, also popular in the area, which tasted a bit barn-yardy, but was fun to drink out of the traditional clay bolees.

That night we went out to the local market and bought a heap of food to have a picnic in our room with a lovely wine that Rob picked up in Paris.

The next day I organised another of Scott’s walking tours around Rennes. I must be the world’s worst tour guide because half of my tour group (all of the women) disappeared after 5 minutes (into a handbag shop). Anyway, the men forged ahead and saw some incredible sights, including the houses of parliament (fire-bombed by fishermen in 1994 and rebuilt), the town hall (where the locals blew up a statue of Anne of Brittany in 1932), the opera house, the ancient city gates and the truly impressive basilica, which house the largest pipe organ I’ve ever seen. By this stage, we were starting to get the impression that the citizens of Rennes have always loved blowing things up.

That afternoon, Ian decided to go for a sauna in the hotel. He finished his sauna and found a shower with jets on the sides that contained different buttons, each emitting different scents. Fascinated by this, he exited the shower to see a rope hanging from the ceiling. He pulled the rope to see what would happen and a bucket of freezing cold water poured over his head! He had to head back into the sauna to warm himself up again!

That night we went out to a fancy creperie, where we sampled more of the local specialty. Again, everything we ordered was fantastic. Carmel finished her meal with a sweet crepe drizzled in Grand Marnier and then flambed at the table. As we watched her dessert burst into flames, it was obvious that this is a favourite dessert of the Rennes citizens, since they love to set everything on fire!

We then said goodbye to Rennes to continue our road trip along the northern coast of Brittany.