Day three – Reims to Rastatt
| Distance today – 401 km | Journey time – 4h 55m |
| Total trip distance – 1,177 km | Total journey time – 13h 55m |
Another day, another breakfast. This time the hotel’s continental breakfast, with just the kind of thing we were after, in their tiny dining room overlooking a small courtyard.
We knew we had a significant autoroute drive ahead of us, so decided to spend the morning in Reims, first visiting one of the champagne producers, before finding lunch. We settled on the Pommery brand (never had it before, no affiliation, etc..) and found their extensive estate situated right on the edge of the city. Hugely grand buildings, and lots of them. Inside we paid for 2 tickets – one with a glass of champagne for Jo, the other without for me as I was driver for the day.
The champagne bar man presented Jo with her drink and explained a little about the brand and the bottle she’d chosen (there were 3 options). She said she quite liked the taste of it, not as dry as those we have had in the past. Perhaps a future purchase, back home.
Then onto a self-guided tour. Basically you can wander the vast caverns under the buildings – there are 18km of tunnels, you only see a small part of it – where they make and store the champagne. Bottles stacked in all kinds of configurations, absolutely everywhere. And we only saw a tiny part of the workplace for 70 employees. There were also various art installations around the route. No idea why.
Once finished with Pommery, we retraced the short drive back into Reims to the previous night’s hotel as there was a boulangerie nearby I thought might work for lunch. It did. Ham and cheese baguette, a thing that was like the top of a Croque Monsieur but on pastry not bread, and two cakes for later – an apple tart and a flan vanille. We had a car picnic and headed off on the long drive….
The journey itself was mostly devoid of interest. We had 3 tolls to go through, which meant I could stick in in Sport Plus and put my foot to the floor (apart from one where police were stopping cars on the other side of the gate, not sure why). And a car had gone under the back of a lorry on the other carriageway, which looked like quite a bad day for the car driver. Other than that, nearly 4 hours on one road.
On arrival in Rastatt we found the hotel. It didn’t look like a hotel, despite a big sign on the wall, as the ground floor (which used to be a restaurant) was empty. At the hotel door (which could have been any door to any property) there was a Ring doorbell with a sign saying press for hotel. We pressed and a voice began to check us in!! The key was in a clever safe on the wall above the doorbell, and that was it – we were in. The hotel was entirely unmanned, with only 5 rooms, a small dining room (breakfast ordered for 8am) and a little kitchen area with snacks for you to take and mark down on a sheet for your room so they could bill you. Weird experience, but I guess they couldn’t make it work with staff there so they made it some kind of remotely-operated affair. The cameras everywhere inside made it have a bit of a Big Brother feel! Super comfortable room though.
After unloading the car we wandered into Rastatt, which is a bit like the Huddersfield of Germany – empty shops, no restaurants, you get the idea. Impressive buildings though, which looked to be municipal in some way.
On the walk back we found a restaurant for dinner (we only saw two, both extremely German) and so went back to the hotel, got changed and returned for food. Wow, amazing food…once we’d used Google Translate on the menu to figure out what to order. The waitress even gave Jo a free potato shnapps (a local thing) to have with her cherry shnapps. The waitress wasn’t wrong when she said it was disgusting. It was foul. Dinner though, was amazing – Hunter’s schnitzel and beef roulade, followed by apple fritters with ice cream AND custard (it came that way, we weren’t being pigs). And the local beer.
