Day

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 alot 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 popularand they bought a case of it to beeaten 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 chateauwas 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!!).