Before diving into the depths of thesis writing, I had one more long weekend in store, this time in the Champagne region of France with a few post-doc friends from the Institut Pasteur. The weather wasn't always on our side, but the company made up for the graces Mother Nature lacked.
To start things off, there was the house where we stayed in a private little park surrounded by an old stone wall. One word: fantastic. (Love Airbnb!)
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| Awesome house in Champagne that we rented for the long weekend |
Our host couldn't be beat. She was kind enough to spend our first day driving us around and fetching us on the second when we got ourselves lost and hungry in a town with only one pizzeria for food, and that didn't open until 6pm.
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| The lakeside restaurant where we kicked off the long weekend in the middle of nowhere. |
Our host took us to a fancy restaurant with a lakeside view and wowed us as the most cultured and worldly self-proclaimed clueless person we'd ever met. (If only we could have gotten the number of her unmarried daughter for a certain single post-doc, she would have made a lovely mother-in-law.)
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| Doing dessert right at the lakeside restaurant |
On our first full day in town, before Halina, Arek, and their car joined out lot, Akos, Ramil, and I ran into more cows than people while hunting for food. (Steak tartare may be in, but we weren't about to explore its creation ourselves last Friday.)
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| A human's "middle of nowhere" is a happening place to be a cow. |
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| The neighboring town of one (closed-in-afternoons) pizzeria in the middle of nowhere. |
And in case our host wasn't cool (and kind) enough, after fetching us from the land of cows, dropping us off at a creperie, coming back to fetch us and take us grocery shopping, and then driving us back home, her husband came home to visit that evening... in his own personal helicopter which he landed behind the house!
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| "Honey, I'm home!": Our host's husband flew in by helicopter to visit on Friday night. No biggie. |
On Saturday, in the company of our more appropriately vehicularly-equipped friends, we ventured further from our Vauchonvilliers home-base in the middle of nowhere to explore some local champagne cellars, the more memorable of which was unquestionably Monial Champagne, a champagne cellar and former Abbey of Clairvaux founded by Saint Bernard in 1115 AD. The Gothic vaulted ceilings in the basement were not only gorgeous but also built with the building's purpose in mind: some vaults, like the one in this photo collage, were designed with holes in the center to allow grape juice to fall when monks pressed the grapes on the floor above.
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| Monial Champagne, a cellar and former abbey founded by Saint Bernard in 1115 AD. |
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| I studied the champagne very carefully at our tasting. |
To wrap things up, since the weather had finally decided it had held up long enough, we barbecued through Saturday night, had an unintentional but fantastic Formula One moment with a magnum bottle of champagne, and finally feasted all day Sunday until we were so stuffed that we absolutely had to call it a weekend.
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| Oh, barbecue, you served us well. |
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| Let's not beat around the bush: we all know why we booked a trip to the Champagne region of France. |
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| The battle of the champagnes. |
Sooner than I'd have preferred, I had to stop hiding from the thesis writing that awaits me in Paris. It's time to dig in for the final sprint of this PhD!
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