Pay attention to the details - Reims

 Monday April 21, 2025

We took the train to Reims today.  French trains are clean, comfortable and run on time.  We had some mild snafus with our tickets however.  Ed had purchased a one way ticket each way but last night we couldn’t find the return ticket despite his assurances that he had indeed purchased tickets going each way.  We decided maybe we hadn’t purchased the return ticket after all and since the train was full, we bought bus tickets from Reims to Paris for the return.  At 4 a.m. Ed woke and found the elusive Reims to Paris tickets in his junk mail. 

We arrived in Reims to find the city essentially closed down as Easter Monday is a holiday in France (though you’d never know it in our neighborhood where almost everything was open today). We had only two goals for the day: tour the magnificent cathedral with its famous rose window and attend the champagne tasting Ed had purchased for the afternoon.

The cathedral, thought to have been founded by bishop Nicasius in the 5th century is one of the oldest in France.  Clovis, the first king of the Franks to unite all Franks under one ruler was famously baptized here - this I actually do recall from my French history class in high school (merci, Monsieur Sampon).  the cathedral started small and morphed over the centuries into an amazing gothic structure where French kings were crowned for centuries - including Ed’s ancestor Henri II (we’ll ignore the fact that Ed’s ancestor was the bastard son of Henri II, but blood is blood, right?).

It was renovated in the 19th century and severely damaged during WW I but was restored again in the 20th century.  That’s a too brief summary of its history but I’m sure if interested you can find more information.

I loved the Chagall windows most of all:

We wandered around a bit killing time until our champagne tasting.  One important detail was overlooked in booking that tasting - it was 35 km away in the countryside!  No trains going there, so we met a wonderful taxi driver who was very kind and was concerned about our getting back to Reims so he gave us his phone number and was available to get us back to town and on time for the train.  That round trip did cost us 300 euros which was actually a discount. Ugh.

The champagne tasting was a lot of fun with the majority of the time spent educating us on the process. Champagne is only legally allowed to be called by that name if it comes from the Champagne region and is highly regulated.  A few folks ignore (disrespect) that law, among them Putin, Trump and the president of Argentina.  Hmm…. 

Ay-Champagne House was our destination which started with the tour and educational piece followed by a test of sorts to see how much we could recall about the steps involved in the process and fragrance test which involved matching the bouquet to the correct aroma.  We then were given 3 different champagnes and had to match them to the correct label.  Shockingly, we did quite well!

At the end of the our taxi driver picked us up and got us to the train on time. Given how much the day cost, we won’t be eating out for a while.