Oh la la…Champagne!

It’s been an amazing week of touring the Champagne region. We’ve seen cathedrals, medieval forts, fortified towns and of course more vineyards than you can imagine! Reims (pronounced Ronse – go figure) has been our home base and we have traveled to Epernay, Troyes and Sedan. In Epernay we walked along the Avenue de Champagne where we saw Moët et Chandon, Mercier, and many others. Troyes is the original capital city for the region and had some amazing tutor-style buildings. We visited the medieval castle in Sedan and we also toured the remains of bunkers 1 & 2 of the Maginot Line near a village called Villy. 

We’ve had 2 champagne tours. The first cellar tour was at Taittinger. It was an hour long tour that took us into the underground cellars where millions of bottles of champagne were stored. It was very impressive and in the end, we bought a bottle of their bubbly which we will drink when Evelyn arrives to celebrate the completion of her Masters.

Our second champagne tour was very cool. We went on this bus that drove through the countryside of Epernay, twisting through little villages and vineyards upon vineyards. It’s incredible to see that many vines all together. On the bus we had champagne (of course) and some brioche – very yummy bread. This bus tour is very new (only 2 months in busy) so they really treated us well. We were the only paying customers – another couple was on board but they knew the owners and were on the bus as tour guides I think. This couple owned 4 or 8 hectares of vineyards (we can’t remember) and shared all kinds of interesting facts about grapes, vineyards and the champagne industry with us. We had a great time on this tour!

We have 2 more days in Reims before we had back to Paris to pick up Evelyn. From Paris we head to Burgundy where we will stay about 30km from Dijon. The photos are more or less in order of our days in Reims.

One of many routes to Reims’ city centre.
Buddha Mark relaxes in our cute little Reims apartment.
The cathedral Notre Dame of Reims.
 

Champagne bottles in the cellars of Taittinger. This facility is just down the street from us.
The church in Epernay.
A very cool entrance to a building on the Avenue de Champagne, Epernay.
Our new mantra😄
Moet & Chandon – very fancy!
A champagne glass chandelier inside Moet.
Very old tutor style buildings in Troyes.
A view of the city centre in Troyes.
Oh such straight and well manicured rows.
The wonderful chardonnay grape.
Just a small sample of the many rows of grape vines.
Our bus tour of the Epernay vineyard. Mark is with the man who owns a vineyard.
The medieval castle of Sedan.
The view from Saint Walfroy. The Maginot line bunkers are on the other side of this valley.
Saint Walfroy – a surprise find as we drove to the top of the valley. Very quiet with an amazing view.
We saw this giant pig statue on our way back to Reims and just had to stop.

Reflections on Paris or ‘Getting about and getting along’

By Mark
I think the architecture of the place has an influence on the character of it. Paris is predominantly composed of six story buildings with narrow streets. Most buildings have storefronts on the first floor, and apartments or offices on the rest. The metro is always close by and parking is for scooters/motorcycles so walking is popular, and its ordinary to see men in suits and women in high heels riding scooters. You will never starve in Paris because you can’t walk 25m without passing a restaurant or food store. The sidewalks are sometimes crowded, but unusual for a large city, people are polite and say excuse me and thank you as we all dodge around. So you have a walking friendly city, a little crowded by our standards because of the narrow streets, and lots of families walking together because living and working is mixed together.

You shouldn’t drink too much wine because you need to stay alert for the bicycle lanes and the posts. The sidewalks are protected from cars trying to park on them by metal posts every few meters. Not too challenging except for the places where driveways cross, and then you may get a surprise if you are looking at the map as you walk.

Coffee. Wow. Yum. Helps with the jet lag, oui !

We had a great day today, wandering about. We were looking for a tour book recommended food market and stumbled across a nice area of streets closed to cars. So nice after dodging traffic. Lunch was sweet crêpes and coffee.

The highlight of the day was Gaston the cat burglar. As we were chilling at the apartment with the window open, a woman poked her head in and apologized because, unseen to us, her cat had entered the apartment through the window. Naughty Gaston was soon reunited with his owner and we all had a good laugh.

Tomorrow we go to the airport to collect our car and then we are off to the Champaign region.

Crimson Kathryn will not be trying these locks.
Check it out…this canal goes under the road!
This is the alleyway leading to our Paris apartment (the glass windows on the left).

Another day in Paris

It was another wonderful day in Paris and Mark almost died from sore feet😊. Walking is definitely the best way to see and experience Paris but it’s awfully hard on your feet. We did the rest of the Paris bucket list – Musee D’Orsay, Champs Élysées, Arc de Triomphe and of course the Eiffel Tower. We even took the stairs up to the first observation area (not because we really wanted to but because the line for the elevator was crazy long). All in all, another great day of exploring. One more day before we head to Reims.

Our first stop – Musee D’Orsay. This museum features the impressionists.
A very interesting Monet. The Orsay had lots of Monets.
Vincent at his best.

Look at all the locks! Vendors even sell them right on the bridge.
Everyone takes one of these photos!
The view from the 1st level of the Eiffel Tower. Can you spot Notre Dame?

Notre Dame and The Louvre

Day 2 in Paris – lots of walking! I think my feet hate me. We had a great day exploring a few of Paris’ many bucket list sights. We started the day by visiting Notre Dame. What an amazing place – really spectacular. We then walked along to the Louvre. I’m not sure what’s more impressive, the artwork collected inside the walls of this incredible building or the building itself. The last part of our walk took us through the Jardin du Tuileries – beautiful gardens and lots of places to sit and admire the fountains. It was also great to get back to our little apartment to relax with some wine and cheese.

A very recognizable building.
Inside Notre Dame.
Stain glass everywhere.
Mark – maybe not so happy to have another photo taken.
Traveling by boat long the Seines (not me, I’m on shore for a change.)
Mona and me! Easier to pose with the poster than the real painting.
The Louvre’s main entrance.
A view of the Seines from a Louvre window.
A well manicured tree in the Jardin du Tuilerie.

Paris in the morning

We made it – landed in Paris at 6:40 am. We had 2 good flights although a crazy woman and her two children sat in front of us on the flight from Washington to Paris. We just drank more wine to deal with the situation 🍾😉.

Our Airbnb apartment is exactly like the photos and was very easy to find. We got here by about 9am. We then decided to walk to Montmartre which is fairly close. After sitting all night it was great to walk around. We have 3 days in Paris before we pick up our rental car and head for Reims. Got to make a plan😉

Sunset on the wing of our plane.

The Basilique du Sacre Coeur
Heading back to the apartment, we found many wonderful street scenes.

Phase Two begins

Hey everyone. It’s been a few weeks since I last posted anything. Mark and I have been home in Braeside doing some renovations and getting ready for phase 2 of our year off. This past weekend we had a great visit in Toronto with both our families and it was a wonderful way to start our European wine tour.

So here we are at Toronto Pearson International Airport, waiting for flight 1 to take us to Washington where we’ll connect to flight 2 to Paris. Let the wine tour begin🎉😉🍾

I started our wine tour off right with a glass of wine with lunch.

Time to go home

Well we have finally come to the end of phase 1 of our year off. Mark and I are resting in a hotel in Orlando, waiting for our flight to Toronto tomorrow (Sunday, Aug 7). From my previous post, you know we had to wait to get into Riverside. We ended up moving Crimson Kathryn over to Riverside on Friday (about 2 minutes by car and 20 minutes by boat – one bascule bridge to pass through between the 2 marinas). We tied up on the end of the haul out dock and then spent the rest of the day packing up. We decided to store all of cushions and fabrics in an climate controlled storage facility just up the street from Riverside. It took us several trips on Friday and Sat. to move all our stuff but it’s worth it.

We started the final storage prep today at 6:30 am and were  ready to leave by 12:30pm. Unfortunately, Riverside couldn’t haul out the boat today so we left her in the water, leaving her in the hands of the Riverside workers to haul out and store our boat. 

Tomorrow we’ll get into Toronto around 3:30pm and spend a few days visiting before we head home for a few weeks. Phase 2 of our year off begins on Aug. 29 when Mark and I fly to Paris, France for a month of touring the wine regions. Evelyn will be joining us on Sept. 10 (after she defends her Master’s thesis on Sept. 6) and spending the fall with us as we visit France, Greece and Australia. Caroline will spend a week with us in Greece – it will be great to have the four of us together even if it’s only for a week.

Here are the last photos for phase 1.

Mark leaves the boat all ready for haul out.

This is Riverside – a bit dumpy but affordable. A good deal with good people (quoting Mark).

These sandhill cranes blocked the entrance to the hotel so we went in the exit.

Waiting to be hauled out in Fort Pierce

Hi everyone. We’re still hanging out at the Harbortown Marina waiting for Riverside to have room to haul us out. We’ve had a chance to relax and enjoy the lovely Florida weather (from inside our air conditioned boat😎⛵️). We’ve rented a car for the week so we can get around and see a few sites. Today we spent the day at Kennedy Space Center. It was very interesting and really neat to see all the rockets and the space shuttle Atlantis. We heard all about NASA’s next venture into deep space and the spacecraft that will be taking some crazy folks to Mars (it won’t be me!).

Wifi is working better thanks to our funky wifi booster called “Groove”. This device is new for us and it hasn’t worked since it was installed at the top of the mizzen at Hop’o’nose. We took it down and tried it with a different cable and now it works great, boosting the wifi signal here at Harbortown so I can include some photos with this post.

Lots of manatees in this part of the ICW. We saw some but no photos of them.

We saw a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral from a big distance.

Our last night at anchor by Serenity Island, just south of Melbourne, Florida.

Melbourne, Florida – not quite as nice as the other Melbourne we’ll visit in November.

Riverside Marina – jammed full of boats. Room for one more, please?
Mark checks out a Saturn 1 rocket on display in the rocket garden at Kennedy Space Center.

Fort Pierce, Florida…how sweet it is (and hot).

After 5 weeks and approximately 2500 km, Crimson Kathryn has finally reached her new home for the fall. What an experience this has been, from the amazing things we’ve seen and people we’ve met, to the stinking hot, hot weather. We started calling this adventure a delivery trip because of the pace at which we were  traveling (and the lack of relaxation we were experiencing). Delivery trips are not the most fun but they are extremely rewarding when you reach your destination.

I think in my last blog I mentioned the Knox Bridge not working. Well we ended up leaving St. Augustine on Wed. night at 10 pm and motoring on the ocean. That went really well once we got out of the St. Augustine inlet (one last green buoy tried to take us out but I saw it at the last minute and Mark reacted with cat-like reflexes to miss it.) It was fairly easy going after that. The ICW  is pretty straight and rather dull after miles and miles of motoring  (except for watching the crazy limited depths).

Right now we are tied up at the Harbortown Marina in Fort Pierce. We are being hauled out and stored at Riverside Marina but they can’t get to us until maybe Thursday this week and they didn’t have any empty slips at their dock so here we are. It’s very nice but a bit expensive. We have lots of work to do in the next few days to get the boat ready for storage. We are taking the masts off again (our insurance company prefers masts down) and the boat really needs major washing. All that salt makes for messy decks. If all goes well, we could be back in Toronto on Sunday, August 7. 

The wifi here is not the greatest, so I’ll have to load my photos later. Stay tuned😀😀

St. Augustine, oh so close

Well we’ve made it into Florida with only one little funny surprise (which I’ll tell you about shortly – it deserves it’s own paragraph😊). Traveling this part of the Intracoastal is much like driving on the highway behind a snowplough – you want to go faster but you don’t dare in case you get stuck in those “skinny” places (shallow for us Canadians). We did run aground a few times but easily managed to get unstuck.

After Thunderbolt (where Mark received some good advice about the engine and things are working much better now), we made our way to Brunswick, Georgia. We had an interesting tie up that night, staying on the fuel dock at Ocean Petroleum. Not the nicest scenary but great fuel prices. It was pretty sketchy but we survived. We did a bit of sailing to get into Brunswick, so that was nice. 

Just before we crossed into Florida (the ocean inlet at St. Mary’s), we met our little surprise. We’d been seeing these very large buildings for some time and had no idea what they were. As we got closer, it became clear that they were part of another naval base – a very special naval base that services submarines (an important side note here, we’d forgotten to turn our radio on that day – a first for us). I think you can probably figure out where this is going, especially if you’ve checked out the photos! As we passed the major dock and entrance channel into the facility, I said “Wouldn’t it be crazy to meet a submarine in here!” Well not 5 minutes later Mark is looking through the binoculars and says “Oh my god, there’s a submarine heading for us”. I thought, yeah right haha. Well there was and with a major escort. One of the escorts (a small naval boat with manned guns – very scary) came zooming towards us because we weren’t answering the radio hails  – oops! They were very nice but firm – stay out of the way and we were very happy to obey. It was an amazing experience to watch this vessel slowly make it’s way into port. I took photos slyly, just in case – big guns and all😳. I tell you, we giggled for awhile after that – dumb Canadians, no radio, big submarine!!

Okay so we made it to St. Augustine yesterday, July 26 and were planning on heading out today for Daytona Beach, but the god of the bascule bridges had other plans. We found out from our friends Sharon and Len (check previous blog) via email that the Knox Memorial bascule bridge just before Daytona Beach is stuck in the down position. That’s a problem. So here we are, spending another day in St. Augustine (which will be fun) and hoping the bridge gets fixed today. We can go on the outside but it’s 53 knots to the next inlet and it’s all motoring into the wind, waves and current. Not much fun. I’ll let you know what happens.

Our Brunswick tie up at Ocean Petroleum.

An early morning anchor is coming up.

No way…a submarine off our port side. Crazy

Florida…we made it😄

Look closely. This poor sailboat is having a rest on the sand.

A grove of palm trees without a resort nearby.