August 2-4
Written August 5-8
Written August 5-8
Dear Friends and Family,
Paris to Epernay, the home of champagne, is probably less than an hour by train. We took all day. We left the hotel at about 6:30 in the morning, bound for Gare St. Lazare. Because I always leave too much time, we could sit for an hour , sip coffee, munch on baguettes, and watch commuters pouring off the local trains. We retirees like to watch workers. Our own train ride to Vernon was an uneventful 45 minutes, followed by a twenty-minute walk to our underground parking place. We repacked and refilled the two small trunks and were on our way.
Our GPS would have chosen a path exactly through Paris, but we still wanted no part of that, so we instructed "Gertrude" in a long arc north from Paris, via Beauvais, Compiègne, and Soissons. Since we were avoiding the freeways, we took the top down and enjoyed the countryside: hours and hours of fields and forests. The most famous forest we went through was known as the Marne Woods and was the site of several World War I battles and, eventually, the surrender of Germany and her allies. The woods are marked with signposts showing the lines taken by various troops to the final battle and surrender ceremony at Compiègne, 65 km north-east of Paris.
For lunch, we stumbled into an even older site, the Abbaye de Longpont. The Abbaye itself is a partial ruin of a 12th Century abbey and, on weekends, the ruin and restored pieces are open to visitors. We could only look at the outside, but the neighboring inn served us a very nice lunch in a perfect garden setting. Our France trip has not been outstanding when it comes to dining, but our Longpont experience helped restore the reputation of French food.
The rest of the drive was pleasant, through the open fields, behind giant farm machines, and eventually into the vineyards that surround Epernay.
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Along the road we ran across the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, the graveyard for over 2,000 Americanpicts/thumbs/d120805_24_andTeresa.jpg soldiers who fought and died in the area during WW I. We pulled into the empty parking lot and visited the monuments to to the US GIs who fell almost a century ago. By now, we've seen several of these final resting places, but it is still an emotional stop. It was heartening to see that we still maintain these places, thanks to the efforts of the American Battle Monuments Commission.
       
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Epernay
In
our French tour of wines, Epernay is the champagne stop. We had
little planned, other than to sample some sparkley. Our hotel, a
plain-fronted business-level (non-executive) Best Western that we could
get for free, was a pleasant stop. It was so similar to the BW I
often used over the last two years in Offenbach, that it felt like
"home". In the end, our simple-but-comfortable hotel may have
been the best part of Epernay, for us.We did try champagne tasting at the visitors center, an easy and cheap way to learn a bit. We also bought a bottle to go with our "picnic" dinner one evening. I don't suppose that makes us experts however. One thing we did notice was that champagne, real champagne, is expensive white wine. We normally favor red over white and "expensive" is not something we search out. I expect we will never be champagne experts.
As a town to visit, Epernay gave us a mixed impression. There were plenty of things to do if one was searching out bubbly, but otherwise it seemed more a prosperous farming town than a tourist destination: nothing bad, just not much memorable. This impression may have more to do with our travel exhaustion than anything else.
We did take a very pleasant drive up through the vineyards, on a well-marked "Champagne Route". A church, whose name I failed to note, dominates a hill over Moussy and gave us a nice view of one part of the vineyards. Over in the "Cote-du-Blanc" part of the vineyards, Cramant gave us another. All in all, a nice place to drive a little convertible.
           
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But, that's another story.
John and Marianne
Maps:
  To Eperney and around the Champagne hills |