Reims

We packed a lot into our fairly short day trip to Reims.  Arriving at noon, we made our way to the Reims cathedral, which was the third awe inspiring cathedral of our trip.  Like the cathedrals in Strasbourg and St. Denis, Reims was almost too much to take in.  The interior was gorgeous, particularly the stained glass windows by Chagall, which rank very high on my "most beautiful things I have ever seen" list.  These windows alone made the whole trip (to France, not just Reims) worthwhile.  Unfortunately, it was too dark in the cathedral to take successful pictures of the windows.

                              

After the cathedral we stopped by the tourist office to see about a tour of a champagne house.  Only one of the many champagne houses in Reims had an English language tour that we could join without a reservation that day, so we hurried off across town to Tattinger.  I was afraid that the tour might be a cheesy tourist attraction, but it was actually fascinating.  The Tattinger cellars date from Roman times and the bottles and barrels we saw being aged there were their super expensive primo champagne.  At the end of the tour they served us a full glass of champagne (the regular stuff, not the expensive variety) in their elegant tasting room.

At this point we had only a little time left before our train was scheduled to leave, but I really wanted to visit the Surrender Museum, where the WW II surrender was signed.  Dave managed to navigate us across town  with enough time to see the museum (a whirlwind tour) and get to the  station in time to catch our train back to Paris.  It was worth the trouble.  The surrender took place in a classroom in a boy’s high school which had been taken over by the Allied forces during the war.  The building is still a high school today, and the small museum is embedded in it.  The room in which the surrender was signed has been left exactly the way it was.

We hustled from the museum to the station and caught our train with time to spare.  Our last excursion outside of Paris was a great success.