A day at the champagne house is not every child’s dream as Nick was keen to remind us this morning. He begged and begged to be left in Paris, and when refused, lodged his protest by dressing in shorts, long socks, sliders and the eye mask he had saved from the flight. He looked pretty terrible but his hopes to embarrass us failed because we couldn’t stop laughing. We made our way to Gare de Lyon, picked up our hrie car and then Chris (that brave, brave man) drove us all out of Paris and on towards Reims for our next adventure. 

We arrived around lunchtime, met Cecily and Darren at the Cathedral and began our day with a lovely lunch at the Belgian pub next door. 

From there we made a plan to drive to Verve Cliquot down the road (which was closed) and from there to Moët and Chandon. Epernay was not what I was expecting – instead of cellar doors down long gravelly roads as we have in Australia, the champagne houses are literally houses down a fairly suburban looking street. Moët and Chandon was a beautifully presented house, with everyone dressed in suits and ties and just a hint of arrogance. 

As Naomi said, they just thought they were pretty good. And the champagne is! And that is why we took the tour. But the tour was boring, factual, precise, (did we need to know that the garden has 20,000 flowers?) – there was no life, no fun….and so we had to make our own! At the end of the tour we were allowed into the tasting room (where there were no chairs and no we werent’ allowed into the reception  room where there were chairs) to try two gorgeous glasses of vintage champagne. After they poured the glasses we decided to sneak out the open door into their lovely English garden (which we were only allowed to look at from the window). We were eventually sprung and told off and that led to great hillarity and when Darren blamed our transgression on Naomi (“that lady said we could,”) and the we sailed forth to tour the hills where the Grand Cru is grown and to finish with Vietnamese dinner in Reims (as you might expect it wasas little weird). We had to say goodbye to the Hansons as we had to to get the hire car back, but on the way home I began to feel worse and worse, until as we were flying along the motorway I had to ask Chris to pull into an aire. As he drew the car  between an enormous truck and van I fell out of the car on my hands and knees and proceeded to vomit helplessly for about five minutes. I vaguely heard some rustling on the other side of the van, but only as I stumbled back from the bathroom a bit later did I realise that two (poor, poor) Muslim men were tr ying to pray on the ground as I heaved up Vietnamese and two excellent glasses of champagne on the other side of the van next to them. Oh God!!! 

We carried on our trip to Paris, with Chris having to make one more stop on the street for me to heave again. We only made it back to the hie car company with a couple of minutes to spare and proceeded to the taxi rank to watch a big fight ensuing between a taxi driver and another man. We hustled Noami into a taxi, jumped in another one ourselves and finally got home and sank very, very gratefully into bed. Poor Naomi drove through a riot on the way home. It felt like a hellish night after a really delightful day. I was really sick for most of the next day and slept and slept.