Champagne

We awoke in our Etap hotel to cloudy weather and a little cold. We’re on the outskirts of Chalons en Champagne so we plan to visit there today, however, we have a couple of errands to run first.

Firstly, and most importantly, breakfast. We find a carrefour so we stop at the little coffee shop there for a snack. We then need a little shopping, nothing exciting, socks, shower jel and water. These items obtained we now need to make an appointment with the vet to get the dogs passports sorted out. The very helpful lady in the pharmacy suggested a vet that was only a few hundred yards away so we head round there and make an appointment for tomorrow at 5pm. The timing is quite critical, we can only enter the UK between 24 and 48 hours after the passport has been signed, we are on the chunnell at 10am on Saturday so that means between 10am Thursday and 10am Friday.

After that we drove into Chalons for a look round. We parked up and found a weekly market was on, pretty much like all european markets, a mixture of total rubbish and food!

Would you buy fruit form this man, he picked his nose just as he was about to pick up the fruit.

We sat and had a coffee in the main square, there was a kiddies ride and we had thought about asking the man if we could let the dogs on but it was quite busy.

We headed off to find the tourist office, Susan wanted to do a tour of the champagne factory. We passed this old church on the way.

This little dog was in the jewellers.

  A nice mix of old and new buildings.

The tourist office suggested that Epernay was the place to do a tour so we headed up there, it’s only about 30km and an uneventful journey.

 

We stumbled across Moet Chandon and that was where Susan wanted to do the tour, I decided not to bother, it doesn’t really interest me and we did not want to leave the dogs in the car.  We killed time by having a wander round the town and had a drink, 8 euros for 2 cokes, the same in cortes costs 2 euros.

Susan went off to the tour and I walked the dogs.

Here are some photographs she took

 

We drove back the slow road and found ourselves back in Carrefour for a coffee. We then went back to the hotel for a couple of hours before heading into town for a meal. The dogs were allowed in the restaurant which was good.

I’m pretty unimpressed with the Champagne region, it’s flat and uninteresting and after a place like Austria which is so beautiful and full of nice interesting people, it seems pretty boring to me.