J'adore Champagne

Our trip has been just wonderful and we head back home tomorrow. I can hardly wait to hug my sweet babies, but first I still have one more day of enjoying Paris (and one long flight home). On Monday and Tuesday we rented a car (by the way, our rental car was an Audi so the French know how to do rental cars right) and went with Laura and Dan to the Champagne region of France which is just a couple of hours away from Paris. We learned that the region has over 300 villages full of champagne houses. The area is so beautiful and the villages are as cute as can be. Since I adore champagne, this was the part of the trip that I was most looking forward to and I have to say has been the highlight of my trip. It was as good as I hoped it would be, if not better! We went to Reims, the biggest city in the champagne region, first. We had a lovely lunch and went to the Martel champagne house and sampled four yummy champagnes. The prices weren't bad either so I purchased a few to take home. We also saw a beautiful cathedral in Reims where all of the Kings and Queens of France used to be coronated. After Reims, we drove to the sleepy little village of Ludes where we spent the night at this really nice old house that is now a bed and breakfast. They also produce their own champagne, Ployez-Jacquemart. The next day we went to another bigger city, Epernay, where most of the big, well-known champagne houses are based. We saw Moet and Chandon (which produces Dom Perignon) and many, many more. We went to the tour at Mercier and saw the cave where they make the wine and did a tasting. It is so cool that the whole champagne region has miles and miles of caves underneath where all the champagne is made. They use the caves to let the champagne sit and ferment for a few years and then they go in and add the sugars and yeast. Then they let it sit longer before they go in and turn the bottles (either by hand or by machine) to get the yeasts to go to the neck of the bottle. Then they remove that stuff and bottle it all nice and pretty. So to finish off our fun times in Epernay, we went to a really cool champagne bar where we sat and tried six different champagnes each (it was so cool because our table was filled with 24 little champagne glasses that she came around periodically and filled to the top one by one). We sat there for a couple of hours and headed back to Paris. What an awesome little trip! I can't wait to go back some day! Since then I've seen Notre Dame, been to the Louvre, been to Galeries Lafayette, had more amazing food and so much more that I will blog about when I get home. Until then, here are a few pictures from our champagne trip, including the first meal we had there in Reims, pictures from the Jacquemart bed and breakfast place and me holding the bottle of champagne I got from there, a picture of the awesome views of the village and grapevines in the countryside and a couple of pictures from Epernay (that weird sandwich with the egg on top is called a croque madame and it was really good).