No rooms in Paris so we are driving again. Our chariot this time is a Peugeot 207 diesel, which is even
smaller than the Fiat. But it
holds our luggage and should get 55 mpg.
Connie did a Magellanesque job of navigation through the streets of
Paris and out into the French countryside. It is different than in le Midi, but no less
attractive. We have been touring
the backroads of Champagne through seemingly endless vineyards. Fields less suited to grapes are sown
with wheat, oats, corn, shard and sunflowers. The frequent “diversions” (detours) have forced Connie to do
a lot of “recalculating” in GPS parlance, taking us off our map and through
some quaint tiny villages, many so small you hardly get a chance to read their
names.
There aren’t many people who remember WWI first-hand anymore but
Champagne is dotted with military cemeteries and monuments from the battles
that were fought here like the one we visited at Château Thierry. The United State owes France a great
debt for their financial help in the American Revolution. But it has been repaid with blood in
both World Wars, a fact I would like to remind some of the less than friendly
French we have run into.
Reims (pronounced with a throat-clearing HR-EHM – the ‘s’ is silent)
is famous for it’s magnificent cathedral.
French kings have come to Reims for coronations since before the
cathedral was begun in 1211, twenty-five in all. The history of the site goes back, as everything here seems
to, to Roman and early-Christian days.
The Cathedral is an early example of the use of slender “flying buttress,”
which allow for tall, open windows that provide light for the interior, while
still supporting the heavy roof.
We just finished Sydney Sheldon’s Pillars
of the Earth and think he may have used Reims as the model for his
fictional cathedral.
Architecture aside (all the gargoyles are animals) the most striking
features are the three stained-glass windows created by Marc Chagall in
1974. We admired other Chagall
glass at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem but these are even more
impressive. For a Jew he does
Christian really well!
We spent Tuesday night in a place that reminded me of our stay in
Paris in 2001. Our rooms at Le
Central also had narrow winding stairways and the toilet was down the
hall. But is cost only $40 not 51
euros! And we had to pay 11 euros more
to park. But we had a nice dinner
nearby. We have been sharing both
salad and mains – they are too big and too expensive for one.
More driving, more detours and more scenery today, but this time in
the rain. We haven’t seen much
sunshine in a week. The church in
Provins dates back to 200 AD and by the looks of them, so do many of the
houses. No two walls are parallel,
nothing is plum and we didn’t see a horizontal line. You would have to drink a lot of wine to put Provins in
perspective! The nearby medieval
town is also right out of Pillars of the
Earth. Like Carcassonne, Provins is a World Heritage Site but unlike
Carcassonne, Provins was a market town, open to the public. The annual wool
fair was pioneer in international trade.
The streets are wide and straight, the walls aren’t as formidable and
there is no keep.
