The disastrous way back to England

Our trip back to England was a bit of an adventure in hilarious errors, that culminated in Booba getting trapped in a bathroom cubicle on a Freeway in the Docks in France.

It all started with where it always starts... shopping. We decided to go to the hypermarkets in Calais where you can buy up to 80 bottles of cheap booze and car load amounts of everything else to take back to England with you.

The port of Calais from the Ferry

The White Cliffs of Dover, taken from the Ferry.

We are planning on having a champagne and cheese house warming party for the 10 people we now know in London, so we bought a dozen bottles of champagne at this insanely large French Costco-esque hypermarket. A bottle of champas is about £3. We also bought 5 bottles of bordeaux, 6 tubs of French butter (by far superior to English butter),a stack of french chocolates, £30 worth of French soap and moisturising creams etc and a 1 dozen cans of tuna in olive oil and 5 French jams.

After loading this all in the back of our tiny car we sensibly allowed 40 mins to get ourselves to the docks before checkin closed, roughly 5 mins away. Or it would have been if I didn't confidently direct Booba onto a hyper- freeway in the wrong direction that took 20 mins for us to get to the first exit.

When we finally got to the first exit, and after much shouting at me, Booba exited and decided to give me yet another talking to about how to read a map. I responded by telling him that he could continue to yell at me once we got back onto the freeway, but he ignored me, and then proceeded to drive at 90 miles an hour past the entrance in completely the wrong direction. Once we finally got back onto the freeway and were heading in the correct direction, I laughed for about 15 mins of the 20 min drive.

We arrived at the Docks in Calais with 10 mins to go before checkin closed, only to be put in a line of cars and made to wait 40 mins at customs. When we finally got to customs we had approximately 10 mins before our ship was due to leave, and we had missed the checkin closure by about 30 mins.

Heroically believing somehow we would still make it, we were then forced to wait another 6 mins in the checkin line, leaving us approximately 4 mins to get our car onto the boat.

When we finally got to the checkin counter, the confused French ferry person alerted us to the fact that Booba had booked us in for 2am that day, rather than 2pm that day, and we were 12 hours and 40 mins late.

So we paid to get on the next ship all the while Booba looking slightly sheepish after yelling at me for the last hour about how an actuary with 10 years of university and post grad study cannot read maps.

We then pulled into the freeway of about 10 lanes that gets cars onto and off the ship, where we had to wait 40 mins to board. Michael went to the bathroom which was basically a little block of toilets in the middle of the freeway, surrounded by shipping trucks and cars. He came back to the car about 35 mins later sweating and grumbling and shaking, because as it had turned out, the lock had broken whilst he was in the toilet, and he was forced to haul himself up and over the 7 ft tall heavy wooden door. He (of course) got stuck at the top, because he couldn't get his big legs through the space, and hung there trying not to fall on the concrete floor and break something. He eventually got down and arrived back at the car in quite a state.

I laughed all the way back to London.

The Champagne Houses

Visiting a Champagne House is nothing like visiting a winery in Australia. The Champagne Houses all have these grand chateaux, with hundreds of years of history attached to them. We saw bottles of champagne that are older than white Australia.

Some of the houses on the avenue du champagne

 Pommery Champagne House (literally the tip of the iceberg, with all the Champas in caves underneath)

Inside a cave - this particular cave held 17,000 bottles of yet to be corked, fermenting champagne

Champagne is kept and ferments underground in caves made of limestone. This limestone provides the perfect environment to store champagne - it being approximately 10 degrees with 90% humidity (an unusual combination).
The second Pommery House (and a French motorcycle gang)

Our favourite House was of course, GH Mumm, it being our drink of choice thanks to one of Booba's friends who smuggled us into their tent at Melbourne Cup last year. Despite doing his best to offend them at last year's after party (in which my cousins Tam and Cath got him absolutely sloshed - or was it the otherway around?), they welcomed us with open arms.

Why is champagne champagne? Because the French, concerned as always about German intentions, had it put into the Treaty of Versaillies that only they could use the term, at the end of WW1, when everyone was else was concerned with less important things, like counting their dead etc etc.

Champagne is actually made in quite a fascinating way:

1. Make wine:essentially they follow the wine making process of picking grapes, bottling them and storing them, but they add yeast and sugar before storing it for about 3 years.

2. Riddle it

Then some poor person (called the "riddler") has to turn each bottle of champagne every 6 hours to rotate the yeast - at present, a riddler turns something like 56,000 bottles a day and machines do the rest. The Champagne Houses tell us it makes no difference to the taste if a machine or a riddler does the turning, but still they employ riddlers all the same... that's socialism for you isn't it?

3. Ice it

Up until now the Champagne has a metal lid. Once the yeast has fermented for long enough and eaten all the sugar in the bottle, the neck of the champagne is frozen and the lid taken off, with the pressure in the bottle causing the left over yeast iceberg to pop right out.

4. Add some sugar

They then add sugar to replace the volume that was lost by the iceberg (the amount of sugar determining if it is a sweet, dry etc champagne), cork it, store it and sell it.

GH Mumm makes 8million bottles of champas this way and Moet and Chandon makes 15 million each year.

In both of these houses, the champagne is stored in the aforementioned underground caves  - Moet's underground caves cover 128,000 km's and Mumm's approximately the same. The caves basically cover the entirety of the town. You are literally walking on Champagne. In theory, if you got thirsty one night, and had a shovel.....

The price of the champagne is slightly cheaper than in London (by about £2-4 a bottle) but insanely cheaper than Australia. A bottle of my favourite Mumm is £20 in Australia its $70 (based on exchange rate it should be about $30).

Champagne for Easter

Booba and I decided a few weeks ago that for the Easter long weekend, we would hire a car, drive to the southern port of England (Dover), put our car on the ferry across the English Channel to France, and drive down to Reims and Epernay (where champagne is actually champagne and not sparkling).

Best. Decision. Ever.

The driving in London turned out to be fine, despite my increasing concerns of the motoring skills of the British, acquired by my few cab rides. Partially due to Booba's terrific driving and partially because we left so early in the morning that there were almost no cars on the road in London (and the rest was freeways) we arrived safe and sound at the docks in Dover, south England.

We also managed to get petrol, which turned out to be surprisingly easy, despite recent "panic buying" and long lines at petrol stations. For those not reading the British newspapers daily, one of David Cameron's ministers got caught on tape by a journalist offering to sell access to various lobbyists and to "persuade" Mr. Cameron of the nobleness of their cause, for a fee. Shortly thereafter, in an alleged attempt to deflect the heat of the media from this scandal, another minister announced that fuel tank drivers planned on striking over the Easter long weekend and everyone should take their tin cans down to the local petrol bowser to stock up before petrol ran out. Chaos, predictably, ensued, despite the unions denying any intentions of striking. Long lines, closing bowsers and a few of the intelligentsia who stored cans of petrol in their garages near live flames filled the papers. Apparently the "recent" petrol shortages of the 1970s refuses to die in the British minds and hearts.

The drive down was nothing special (despite a few people telling me it would be gorgeous etc etc and the entire south of England being marketed as "England's Garden") - looked rather like an overgrown paddock with a few cows (that looked cold) thrown in.

The trip across the Channel on the Ferry was also nothing special (although the trip back certainly was an adventure - more of that later).

We arrived in France around 11am Friday morning and immediately it was quite spectacular. The drive to the champagne region was about 3 hours (I forbade Booba from going the clearly absurd speed limit of 130 miles an hour in favour of us arriving safe) and the whole way it was sweeping manicured crops and tiny French villages.

The tiny wine tine we were expecting turned out to be a massive industrial French city approximately the size of Geelong (but better, obviously).

Fortunately I had had the good sense (i.e. a budget) to book us in at a b&b that was the epitome of French Provincial, complete with croissants for breakfast, run by a lovely French maman in a tiny village outside of Reims. It screamed Tamara Grima.