Our Trip to Europe

Day 34 – Lauterbrunnen to Beaune, France

We left fairly early this morning to head for France. The scenery as we leave is absolutely beautiful. I will miss Switzerland and wish we could spend more time here. We made our first rest stop in Switzerland and everybody wanted to use up their Swiss Francs and so we all loaded up on Swiss chocolates. We stopped for lunch at a French rest stop that was attached to a fairly large shopping mall. They had delicious food and a lot of choices. The scenery has changed again from mountains to hills and the French countryside is covered in vineyards.

We arrived in Beaune and jumped off the bus and hauled our luggage to the hotel. It is a very old place that wanders in all kinds of directions and has several courtyards. There aren’t any elevators but our room is only on the second floor but the steps are very narrow and curved so it was a bit of a chore to get our suitcases to the room. Unfortunately it isn’t air conditioned and our room opens up onto the street so we can’t leave our window open.

We all met for a quick orientation of the town and then we were free to wander around before meeting up again for a tour of a winery and wine tasting. I did a little shopping and we wandered around until we found a church that we went into and took some pictures. Time for our winery tour and we went down in the cellars that are extremely old. When they excavated the tunnels they found tombs for some monks that were in the area. Part of the winery building was a church at one time and the monks were usually buried under the church. We only tasted three of their wines and some cassis but we didn’t buy anything as we didn’t want to have to haul it around. From the winery we walked over to a nearby restaurant for a group dinner. Jennifer had chosen the menu and we were to have a true Burgundian meal as Beaune is in the Burgundy region of France. We started out with escargot and parsley ham that was in clear jelly stuff. Not very appetizing looking but we tried it and it was actually very good. In France they normally eat 2-5 courses at their meals and take a minimum of 2 hours to eat. We all had beef burgundy for our entree and then a cheese plate for our dessert which is very common here.

Everybody headed back to the hotel – we leave for Paris in the morning.