|
2008rench
Road Trip
Nov 14 - 23, 2008
Trip Journal
|
Chalons en Champagne
Chateau de Jaulny |
|
We
had breakfast at 8:30am. We had French bread, croissants,
juice, jam... all you can eat in a continental breakfast. ¡@
We had asked
Madame Lallement to take us through the champagne making and she was
so kind to offer a tour
for
us. We agreed to meet at 10am. ¡@
To make sure
we would get the
most
out from the tour, Madame Lallement found a friend of hers to be our
interpreter. They took us through the machines and processes
from pressing to labeling the bottles. It's
amazing business. And the family had a real limestone cave
indeed under where we slept for the night!
Real
cool :) ¡@
After the tour
we had a tasting of the Traditional champagne. Champagne in
the morning :D.... After that we tried also another glass of rosê.
The Lallement champagne is quite dry and we bought a bottle of rosê
for our
last
night in Paris. ¡@
We finally
left Verzy at around noon. Heading south for Chalons en
Champagne (30km). It is an old champagne city which has a
lot
of interesting small traditional buildings. The construction
is simple. A lot of the houses were not built perpendicular to
ground. We saw a lot of them inclined at an angle, not sure it
was because of
gravity or it was built that way. ¡@
There was a
supermarket there and we went there and shopped for some snacks and
stuff. Except me, they all like eating oysters. French
oyster is quite popular and they bought a case of it to be eaten on
the road! Crazy people!
¡@
We
left Chalons en Champagne at around 3:30pm. We first stopped
for gas and since it's our 1st fill, we did it very
clumsily. ¡@
We stopped in
the middle of nowhere and they started to do a setup to eat the oysters.
Crazy people! ¡@
It
was really too cold and they finished around half of the
case
and we continued to our next destination,
Chateau de Jaulny (136km
from Epernay). Jaulny turned out to be a very remote village
off the main road and our chateau
was on the top of a small hill. Our choices of chambres d'hotes
never ceased to amaze us. The chateau was from the 11th
Century and we were stopped by the gate and thought our GPS was
malfunction! It looked like a museum than a place to sleep...
anyway, Anna, our host came out to greet us and there we were in our
rooms where the nobles and knights hundreds years ago resided.
We took the guest table too and Anna had prepared a great dinner for
us. We drank champagne, white and red with the meal and it was
a good 3-hour meal. We were a bit drunk and tired so called it
a day right after meal (phew, got to get fat!!). ¡@
• Home • Up • Day 0 & 1 • Day 2 • Day 3 • Day 4 • Day 5 • Day 6 • Day 7 • Day 8 • ¡@
[08 France Album] [08 France Trip Video] [08 France Trip Journal] ¡@ |