Tuesday and Route Touristique du Champagne…

Roof down day and a road trip through the vineyards…. mile upon mile, hectare after hectare of vines growing grapes for Champagne! Each plot designated to a house…

Grapes!!!

And in every village there were sign posts to Champagne Houses…. nearly every other property was a cave!!

At Verzenay we saw the windmill which is owned by Mumm. It was built in 1818 and was a working mill. During the 1st World War it was used as an observation post by the allies.

Close by is the Verzenay Phare, a lighthouse built by Joseph Goulet in 1909 for advertising purposes. It is now an eco museum.

We moved on to Epernay, a Mecca for Champagne lovers, and home to many of the world’s most celebrated Champagne Houses. No visit is complete without a walk along the Avenue de Champagne, where numerous houses are located….

We paid a visit to two…. Most & Chandon and the lesser known Boizel…

Aside from Champagne Houses we also visited the Portail St Martin. Possibly the oldest monument in Épernay, this ruin is the last remnant of the renaissance Abbey of Saint-Martin, which stood at this port until it was demolished in stages in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This western portal is from 1540 and has to be seen for the quality of its stonework, representing cherubs, Hercules and a variety of animals, among them salamander.

This helps date the church to the reign of Francis I in the first half of the 16th century as the salamander was his personal emblem.

Épernay’s Hôtel de Ville is on the western end of the Avenue de Champagne.

The resplendent neo-renaissance mansion was donated to the town by the Auban-Moët family after the previous building was destroyed in the First World War.

You can ponder the architecture for a couple of minutes but the big draw here is the garden.

This was designed by the Bühler Brothers, landscape architects who plotted gardens across France in the 1800s, most notably the Parc de la Tête d’Or in Lyon.

There’s a rockery, pond, formal flower beds and a beautiful pavilion to saunter around.

The funniest sign we saw today…

There was so much to see….

However, the most moving was when we happened upon a war cemetery, quite unexpected. Marfaux cemetery commemorates over 1000, 1914/18 war casualties of which over 300 are unidentified and special memorials to 8 soldiers believed to be buried among the unidentified. Tomorrow we visit Ypres and the Somme area. I think it quite uncanny we experienced this today….