Interlude Post 10 from Paris, France

We did it! Tour of Europe...check!  Tomorrow we fly to South Africa for two weeks of Safari in Kruger National Park, followed by 6 weeks road tripping Oz, a brief stop in Hawaii and finally back to Navigator.  It has been a whirlwind! Chris finished the video highlighting our adventures "on the continent." Look for it in the "videos" tab above, or click here.

We enjoyed our visit to the neolithic caves, Font De Gaume is one of the few in the world still open to the public and there are strict guidelines about how many people in the cave and how long the visit because the carbon dioxide from your breath and pollen you track in with you cause degradation to the paintings.  This adds up to only 80 visitors per day and in order to secure our spot, we waited for an hour before the ticket office opened.  Unfortunately, this happened to be on the same day that autumn decided to make its official appearance, and it was really chilly!  The smell of fall is in the air, the leaves are changing, yep, definitely time for us to head to the southern hemisphere!

The next day was a long trek across the beautiful heart of France into Burgundy, famous wine country.  In my opinion, the French do it best.  The small town of Beaune was ringed with unassuming buildings housing miles of interconnecting 14th century underground cellars.  It was so neat to walk through tunnels that had housed wine for centuries, longer than any history of the USA!  We did a tasting, and determined that red wine, French or Italian, is really not our thing.  The following day, we hopped on our squeaky bikes (they have taken quite the abuse on this trip!) and set off through the vineyards.  It was amazing.  The clouds threatened rain, but only a sprinkle came down, the bike path was free of traffic and wound through endless rows of grapes readying for harvest.  The path was punctuated with small villages whose livelihood depends on the harvest and we could see everyone getting their equipment ready.  The green (chardonnay) grapes get picked first, and we got to see several families of pickers loading large bins full of grapes to take to the press.  We counted ourselves lucky to be able to see the harvest in action, which only takes about a week of the whole year.

From Burgundy, we drove north to Champagne region and the town of Epernay and straight down "Champagne Avenue" which is lined with all the heavy hitters in the business, including Moet, makers of Dom Perignon (who was a monk that used to work the cellars under this town way back).  We visited Champagne de Castellane, and got to see the process of making bubbly from juice arrival to tasting.  Sparkling wine is unique in that it requires a second fermentation unlike still wine in order to create the bubbles, then must be tilted slowly to work any sediment in the wine down to the bottle neck, which is then frozen and removed quickly from the bottle before final packaging.  The operation we saw is run by less than 50 people and produces about 3 million bottles a year.  Most of the bubbly is consumed in France, and this particular organization exports to Europe, but not the US. Their cellars house vintages dating back to 1904, which would run you about 10,000 euro.  Funny, it looked like any other dusty bottle on the shelf!

That same day, we drove another couple of hours to Versailles, our final camping location.  We gorged on patisseries, visited the interior of the palace (which was indeed impressive) and enjoyed a stroll down the tree lined Avenue de Paris.  We went in search of packing material to send our beloved bikes back to the States, since we don't want to hump them around for the rest of the trip, and assembled our free giveaway box of camping gear that we weren't taking with us, hoping it would find a good home.  Our last night camping....rained, and rained hard.  We woke up in a puddle with no choice but to pack up a wet tent and head for the airport hotel.  We unloaded the car, set up the tent in the parking lot to dry out and got nostalgic as we collected all the random ticket stubs and receipts that inevitably found their way into every nook and cranny of the car.  We successfully searched for a laundrymat open on a Sunday and finally called it a day.

Yesterday, we sent the bikes home, returned the car and chilled out, catching up on news, working on the video and packing.  Today, the weather is foggy, but we'll take the train into Paris for one last adventure before we hop our flight tomorrow.  Last night, I was wandering through the airport train station, looking for dinner, and found myself in front of a giant screen showing all the flight departures for the airport.  It was awe-inspiring to see cities all over Europe and the world listed, and thinking that we could get anywhere from Paris!  It brought a smile to my face to think of all the places in Europe listed there that we have now seen and experienced, but also exciting to see all the places we have yet to visit!  We are both ready for the next adventure and are looking forward to the change of pace in Africa.