Champagne

My good friend Guy Nightingale whom I have know for about 15 years suggested that I visit the champagne region. Guy is an Uber positive chap and always interested in the people around him, a hard worker and all round good fella. He started his working life in the vineyards of France and many other countries and has many friends throughout France in the business. Guy has suggested that I drive the champagne tourist route, through the vineyards on more empty roads and beautiful vistas. I have clearly landed at a busy time, with constant tractor movements and a large Romany community in the region helping with collecting the grapes. All seem to coexist well and it’s a happy place. The vineyards stretch for miles and the weather improves with each day I head further south. I have stopped in a village named Les Riceys right in the heart of the region. I took wine with a lovely German couple outside the hotel last night as well as a Dutch couple the guy having grown up in Milton Keynes. The crack was good and we shared numerous stories. I felt sad not to be part of the EU any more. The German couple live near the French border and both work in Switzerland, but enjoy a freedom of movement that post pandemic, I suspect we will miss. Only time will tell on that. You can’t help thinking that the UK needs to kind of grow up? The fine cultures you find across Europe, seems to me to be lost in the UK these days in a mad rush to make money and buy stuff, most of which we don’t need. When you ride motorbikes you realise there isn’t much else apart from family that you need. You watch the people in their cars racing around to get somewhere, with rather lost expressions, trapped almost, in their little boxes to go back to their house box! Many go far too fast and don’t give a toss about other road users. With what’s left of my existence I intend to breath in the air far more! Anyway tomorrow I lunch with one of Guy’s oldest friends in a town called Beurne another 100 miles further south. There I stay for two nights then I will start heading back, taking my Covid tests and contemplating the next chapter of my life😊Leggi altro