Champagne: Reims, the Avenue and the Côte des Bar

Editor's note

The first night is at Camping Country Park at Touquin, an easy opening leg of 15 km, with the day's ground 10.7 km away. Coulommiers gave its name to one of the cheeses of the Brie, and it is worth buying one in the town and eating it there. On the heights above stands the best-preserved Templar commandery in Île-de-France, with its chapter room, chapel, dovecote and a medieval garden replanted since 2019. Down the Grand Morin, Crécy-la-Chapelle is the Venise briarde: canals lined with washhouses and mills, and a Gothic collegiate church built between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Editor's note

Two nights at the Camping Municipal d'Épernay, on the Marne at the end of the Allée de Cumières, 127 km on. The Avenue de Champagne is 1.9 km from the gate, so the first day is done on foot: the Avenue itself, the cellars of Moët & Chandon, then Hautvillers above the vines, where Dom Pérignon is buried. Reims is 22.7 km north for the second day — the cathedral where French kings were crowned, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991, the Palace of Tau next door with its museum of the cathedral and the coronations, the basilica of Saint-Remi and its relics of the bishop who baptised Clovis, and the Taittinger cellars in the Gallo-Roman chalk pits beneath the city.

Editor's note

The last night is at Camping Les Grèbes du Lac de Marcenay, on the lake at Marcenay, 180 km south; Les Riceys is 13.9 km from the gate. The commune holds all three of Champagne's appellations: champagne, coteaux champenois and rosé des Riceys, a still pinot noir rosé made here and nowhere else. With 866 hectares it has the largest vineyard area of any commune in Champagne. Taste the rosé at a grower, then the same grower's champagne beside it. Les Riceys is really three villages, each with its own church: Ricey-Bas, Ricey-Haut and Ricey-Haute-Rive. Essoyes, where Renoir had a studio built at the bottom of the garden in 1906, is a drive on from there.