“Oh, kungfu shoes”

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Luxembourg-Maginot Line-Reims-Paris

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​After the storms the night before we looked over our tent and our belongings.  Everything that was near the door of the tent (including the bottoms of our sleeping bags) was soaked through, and our tent was in bad shape, how could we possibly get it into the round shape it needed to be in to go into its bag?  It took a lot of work and possibly a few more broken poles but we managed to squeeze it in there, it was not pleased. 

Next stop the Maginot Line.  I’ve never heard of this before, but apparently between the World Wars France build a long line of defense systems along their border with Germany, rightfully not trusting their disagreeable neighbors.  They were pretty sure it was impenetrable. The Germans had a look, and probably a giggle, and then invaded Belgium and simply waltz around that line of defense, France fell shortly thereafter.  In other words it was never used, we found it in that state.  Unused, empty and easily walked around.  The one with the proper visitor center wasn’t open until 2, so we just had a look, I think Jonathan really just wanted to point and laugh at the French.

Next we were on to Reims in the unbelievably beautiful Champagne region.  We picked up a few bottles in the most random vineyard possible and decided to do a tour of Mumm.  While sitting in this champagne house waiting for a tour another couple sat down, the man looked at our Feiyues and said “Oh, kungfu shoes?”.  Turns out he’s a KungFu master and studied in Shaolin 20 years ago, what are the odds? He and Jonathan chatted about how the temple has changed until it was time for the tour.

Mumm has something like 25 million bottles of bubbly being stored and aged currently in their underground caves.  25 million… that is insane.  The very keen girl told us all about the aging process and how each bottle is, to this day, still carefully turned by hand and not by machine.  All the grapes are still cut by hand and everything in the process is painstaking.  It was really interesting, and at the end we got samples, even more interesting.

We’d noticed that once again our tires, particularly our front left, are worn down.  Fearing a blow out, we went to the tire shop and asked if they would switch our front tires so we could make it back to England without incident.  They had one look at the tire and said it would have to be replaced, again.  Unfortunately a tire dealer did not have our tire size in stock and refused to rotate them for fear of a lawsuit.  What to do… what to do.  In typical Hair fashion we figured we’d roll with it and hope to make it the next few days back to England, keep your fingers crossed.