I felt pretty proud of how our day trip to Chartres played out. Day trips are just really a wide open opportunity for travel disasters and require a lot of planning since you’re showing up at an unknown train station and trying to do a quick tourist circuit.
When I planned our day trip to Reims, I failed to discover that our travel day was the same day as the Paris Marathon, with 55,000 runners. I did finally sort it out in the week leading up to our departure, but by then it was too late to re-route as we had train tickets and specific site entry tickets in Reims.
Our hotel helped us sort out a transit plan to get across town – we had to cross the marathon route to get to the train station for the Reims departure. My college friend, Pam, in addition to having tea with me, walked me down into a Metro station and literally purchased our Metro tickets and showed us how to enter and exit the Metro (public transportation ticket purchase and usage is no strong point of mine – seems simple, but somehow my past includes this:
- Can never actually complete ticket purchase with kiosk
- Buy the wrong ticket
- Can’t feed ticket into entry turnstile
- Can’t make entry turnstile open despite feeding ticket
- Get on wrong train
- Get on right train but fall asleep because it is warm and lose ticket required for exit
So, ever smarter and wiser, we went to the Saint Michel Metro station, correct tickets in hand, ready to Metro to our train to Reims and I find that the entire Metro station is closed for the Marathon.
And suddenly we are faced with a Paris “Marathon” of our very own! Can we cross town, on foot, in under 30 minutes, when it’s 45 degrees out and raining, in search of a train station we’ve never been to, when Sam, somehow, still has not acquired a bra, despite being a very “gifted” shopper? (Sam would specifically like you to know that she is in possession of something she calls a soft sleep bra, which she has been wearing since she left the US on March 30th).
In a panic, we hail a cab that goes about 1000 feet before the driver says Marathon Marathon Marathon and pulls over to let us out, charging us 7 Euros. This 7 Euros is added to the 20 Euros we spent on the book of Metro tickets we’ve already acquired, making for a grand transportation expenditure of 27 Euros for 3 adults to race across Paris on foot, using no transportation whatsoever.
We do actually make our train to Reims and head right to the Museum of the Surrender. This is the place where the Third Reich officially surrendered to the Allied forces in World War II on May 7th at 2:41am. At the time, the building was the European headquarters of General Eisenhower. The surrender signing took place in the War Room – which has been frozen in time and maintained – the signing table, the strategic maps and all:
It was a surprisingly emotional place to visit. I was struck by the businesslike decorum of the meeting and the table – which reminded me more of a meeting of attorneys sitting around a mediation table and did nothing to mirror or convey the depth of the extraordinary human suffering and hatred that propelled the war years.
From the Museum of the Surrender, we set out to explore the rest of Reims. We stopped in at the Cathedral Notre-Dame de Reims, where a Palm Sunday service was going on, limiting our access, so here’s two shots of the outside:
Later in the day, we came across a second cathedral – the Basilica Saint-Remi, from 1049. We all loved this place and I thought the exterior was an interesting contrast between the nearby modest apartments:
I will say, though, that I think that my tour group despised me by the time we got to the Saint Remi and I cannot say I blame them. The root of the problem, I think, was that I had already surprised them with a march across Paris and so it was crucial that I shepherd us through Reims with no added mileage, which, sadly, did not work out.
I really wanted to show them some Reims buildings/museums on the main square but it was Sunday and virtually everything was closed. My troops began insulting the entrenched European tradition of Sunday closures and then, further, began insulting the mix of Reims architecture, and so I grew increasingly desperate to find them something to do.
In defense of Reims, I offer some of the more charming buildings:
Our wanderings confirmed that pretty much everything in Reims is closed on Sunday. The lunch hour approached and, with no other visible options, I set up a lovely catered picnic lunch on the steps of a local business:
As we dined, I tried to remind them that at least we were out of the rain. We had a view onto a laundry mat, and a mass of pigeons waited a few feet away for our crumbs. Ron, despite being specifically told not to, decided to throw some treats to the pigeons with the expected (well I expected it and you all probably expected it) result.
After we ate, everyone announced that they needed to go to the bathroom and we spied this public cubicle bathroom just steps away. Here is a mid-attempt picture of the 3 of us trying everything we could think of to get in there – with no luck:
By now, it was time to head to our second Reims site. Reims is in the part of France famous for champagne production and the city has numerous champagne houses, where you can do a little tour and be rewarded with a glass of champagne in the end. From our failed bathroom stop, it was just a kilometer to my chosen champagne house.
We’d been on the streets of Reims for about four hours by then. Sam, an astute (yet bra-less) walker accurately pointed out that, while Reims likes dogs in general, they do not seem to be as enamored with picking up after the dogs, and so we addressed the issue this way: whoever is in front of our tour group must call out Red Guy Red Guy as needed to avoid contact with vehicles , but, in addition, you must also call out dog crap dog crap to avoid contact with feces and I feel like this dual hazard challenge created a nice sort of camaraderie.
No one run over by a bus and with no dog feces on any shoes, we reached the Vranken Pommery champagne house. I chose this house because of the architecture:
We also got to tour Villa Demoiselle, from 1904, built in a blend of art nouveau and art deco styles. It’s owned by the Vranken family, and so a tour of the champagne cellars includes an option to stroll across the street to see this place:
The main Vranken property was built on old chalk pits built by the Gallo-Romans. They have been operating a champagne house on the site since 1878. The property was initially owned by the Pommery family and is now overseen by the Vranken family. They are particularly famous for being the initial developer of “brut” champagne, whatever that is. I was more wowed by the 116 steps leading down to the cellars:
I also liked that there was an art gallery, of sorts, plopped into the cellars, and that the Vrankens feel like I feel: it’s got to be big so we all know it’s art:
From the champagne house, we talked Sam into just a little more walking, and hit the train station in Reims at the 12 mile mark for the day. Ron and I are off to Stuttgart now – the start of our car factory tours. The biggest impulse purchase risk we’ve ever faced awaits us in Stuttgart – Ron could buy a Porsche on the spot and have it shipped home, which sounds so outrageous as to be impossible, but, as we’ve learned, anything is possible with Ron, and so I will be watching him closely in the “gift shop”. I took my eyes off him for a second in the Chartres cathedral and when I turned back around he was sporting a “Chartres” baseball cap.
I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures in my continuing series of confusing European signs:
Travels with Valerie 