Champagne Please!

As you may recall, I went to Champagne back in March with my friend Lee and had a fabulous time.  Ever since then I’ve wanted to take Nate back so he could see it as well.  And now that we’re in Paris and it’s only 45 minutes on the train from here to Champagne, we have a great opportunity to go.  So two Saturdays ago, Nate and I planned a day trip to Champagne.  We went back to Rachel, our informative tour guide who now feels more like a friend.  She took us back to Wafflart-Briet where Nate learned all the details around making champagne while of course drinking their delicious champagne.  We got a little tour around the champagne house, which sits in a cute little village of no more than 400 people called Sacy.  After a nice light lunch there and purchasing a case of their champagne (would have purchased more too but a case was probably the most reasonable to take back on the train with us) we were off to Casanove.  

Casanove is a slightly larger champagne house where you’re able to take a tour and see their production area.  This was also interesting as of course it’s on a much larger scale than Wafflart-Briet.  After our tour and of course tasting there, we were off to Pommery to see a well known large champagne house.  After arriving there and stepping inside, you could definitely feel that it was basically all about marketing.  The tour takes you down into the caves, which is kind of cool but you don’t see anything that has to do with how they actually produce their champagne.  Of course at the end of the tour you get what starts to feel like your reward in the form of a glass of champagne.  

To be honest I actually liked the small champagne house much better than the larger ones like Pommery.  But I felt like we had to go check it out just to see what it’s all about.  I must say though, they did have a lovely champagne bubble Christmas tree outside which was quite fun!

A lesson in History

This post is a few weeks overdue, my bad people but it's a free blog so you'll just have to wait.  Now finally getting around to it, wanted to share one of our recent weekend adventures to Normandy.  As an American who has always had interest in World War II history and having been to a number of different sites and museums in Europe, I thought it important to visit the D-Day beaches and see this location in history.

As per usual, we of course planned our trip with Stacey and Alex who joined us for the weekend in Normandy.  The train trip from Paris to the town of Bayeux was about 2 hours or so getting us in to Bayeux around 8:00 that night.  Stacey and Alex didn't arrive until much later so Cleaver and I had a nice dinner at this little bistro near our hotel and pretty much called it a night.  After all it was a long week of work and we had a fairly early start in the morning.

Any morning at a French B&B will begin with a nice spread of croissants, coffee, and other pastries and our place in Bayeux did not disappoint.  After the 4 of us had a nice French breakfast, the tour guide we hired for the day picked us up and off we go.  We had hired a tour guide for the full day tour which was definitely the way to go.  On the itinerary, Sainte-mère-église, Utah beach, Omaha beach, Pointe du Hoc, the American cemetery and he also took us to this little church that had a part in D-Day as well as it had been set up as a makeshift first aid post.  While taking us to these various sites our guide offered lots of history, stories, and explanations about the invasion, all of it quite interesting.

With so much information and so much that we saw that day, it's difficult to share everything but I'll mention a few highlights.  First the beaches, both Utah and Omaha.  Having read so much over the years, seeing movies, and then finally standing there on the beach looking at the cliffs and the water, hard to imagine what actually occurred there.  Very surreal to stand there and consider how many people died and the significance of the event on so many levels.  Looking at for example Pointe du Hoc and seeing all of the holes in the ground caused by pre invasion bombing, seeing the German bunkers and fortification, and imagining what it must have been like for the soldiers there, all made for a fascinating experience to be standing in that same location.

Pointe du Hoc

Also of interest was Sainte-mère-église where many of the paratroopers that were first on the ground landed and as we found out then made famous by the book and movie "The Longest Day".  Most famously the square and church which had a few paratroopers get their parachute caught on the roof and today they memorialize this with a "dummy" stuck on the side of the church.

Last stop of the day was the American cemetery with 9,387 graves and a memorial at one end of the site.  Similar to the rest of the day, very interesting and very surreal to walk these grounds, a very worthwhile experience and highly recommended to be sure.  Not just the cemetery, but the entire day.

American Cemetery

A few other notes from the weekend, the town of Bayeux is a very cute small French town.  We had a wonderful dinner on Saturday night and on Sunday spent some time walking around.  Like most towns in Europe there is a giant church which was quite impressive and we also discovered they have a museum with a 70 meter long tapestry made in 1070 to tell the the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which was kind of neat.

After walking around the town for a bit, we started to make our way back to the train station and back to Paris after a very interesting weekend of history.

Thanksgiving in Paris

With Jacalyn & Rio and Robin & Dave

Since we moved to Paris we’ve made friends with a few other American couples.  So this year for Thanksgiving we decided we should do a proper dinner and all get together to celebrate the holiday.  Our proper dinner would be on the Saturday after Thanksgiving though since well, we still have to work on Thursday and Friday here.  We decided that we would do dinner at our house and then move to Robin and Dave’s house for dessert.  We’re about 15-20 minutes from each other and we figured that a walk in between dinner and dessert would be good.  And our neighbors seem to be quite sensitive to noise coming from our place (we’ve had 2 knocks on the door since we’ve moved in...yikes!) so we figured it would be good to not keep the party at our house late into the night.  

We got our turkey from the Thanksgiving Store.  Yes, there is a store called the Thanksgiving Store here in Paris.  It’s tiny but it’s made for expats just like us that miss certain things from home, like cheddar cheese, ranch dressing, etc.  It’s good to know it exists for those emergency cravings.  

Anyways, we had Robin and Dave and Jacalyn and Rio, our American friends, and Haakon and Emily, Nate’s friend from work and his wife, over to our house for dinner.  Emily is French and Haakon is Norwegian so we introduced them to this awesome American holiday.  Everyone pitched in bringing a dish and we had a delicious meal!!!  It truly felt like the actual Thanksgiving holiday, just here in Paris, stuffed bellies and all.

We have so much to be thankful for, it would be hard to name it all.  But we are especially thankful to have found such great friends here in Paris.  

And now it’s already December and Christmas is just around the corner!  We are heading home for a traditional Christmas.....I can’t wait!  It will be nice to spend our time with family and see some friends.  It’ll be a quick trip (as they always seem to be) since we are heading back to bring in the new year here in Paris.  Again, just so much to be thankful for!!!