Time to find a place to stay:
Reims seemed to be an obvious choice. Big name Champagne houses in town, five main wine producing areas nearby, and close enough to small villages with their own Champagne houses, this fit the bill.
Since we were only going to be there 10 days, I decided to focus on three of those five main wine producing areas. Thes five regions include Montagne de Reims, Vallee de la Marne, Cote des Blancs, Cote des Bar, and Cote de Sezanne.
Montagne de Reims is known for Pinot Noir grapes. We could find the towns and villages of Mailly, Verzenay, and Verzy.
Grapes grown in the Vallee de la Marne are Pinot Meunier and are centered mostly around Epernay and Ay.
Cote des Blancs is known for its Chardonnay grapes, The villages of Avize, Cramant, and Chouilly,
Pinot Noir and some Chardonnay in the hills can be found in the Cote des Bar region.
Much smaller in size in the Cote de Sezanne region where you will find both Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. These tend to be fruit forward in taste.
When we travel, we like to stay in apartments instead of hotels. Nothing against hotels. But, staying in a space like an apartment gives us more options. We can eat breakfast or snacks in our own space, put a bottle or two of Champagne in the refrigerator for later, do some laundry if we need to, and have more space to spread out.
Since we travel a lot, I spend quite a bit of time searching rentals from Airbnb, VRBO, and any other vacation rental companies I find. This time there was just my husband and me so I searched for a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment with a washer close to the main area in Reims. Keep in mind when renting an apartment in Europe, bathrooms can mean different things than we might assume here in the US. If you like a shower, make sure that is specifically listed. If you prefer a tub, look for that.
Reminder…When looking for an apartment with two bathrooms, check to see how many toilets (water closets) are listed. If the listing doesn’t specifically say, check the photos carefully. We’ve thought we had two toilets when we traveled with my brother and sister-in-law only to find out the listing that said two complete bathrooms did not actually include two toilets. Yes, it had two showers and two sinks but only one toilet. Had we looked at all the photos carefully, we would have seen their two pictures of toilets were actually the some one just photographed from different angles.
In Reims we ended up with an amazing apartment that included a parking garage. Our host spoke no English and my French is fairly weak. I’m much better at reading it than speaking! We made it work by translating through an app. He met us on a side street as the street where we were staying had bollards. We needed a card to scan as we entered the street so the bollards could descend into the street and we could drive through.
The apartment could not have been better. Spacious and well equipped, we could have easily stayed for a month instead of nine days! Location was perfect with walking distance to everything we needed. I’ve tried to book this apartment a second time but it was already booked. I can definitely see why. It’s one of the best places we have stayed.
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