Beaujolais wine region

One of the great things about doing a tour is that we get to see and visit places that we would never have been able to if we had done it on our own. After a long day of travelling from Paris, we ended up in the Beaujolais Region. It is an old wine region that is famous for making really good red wines. It was quite a change from the sophistication and elegance of Paris. Here, it was a mountainous green region with rows of vines everywhere you looked. The houses looked like they've been there for centuries and you could still see people pruning the grape vines by hand. It was the perfect idyllic country setting.

The cool part of this stopover is that we got to stay in a Chateau! During the tour, we mostly stay in trailers in campsites outside of the city, so staying in a fixed building was really exciting. But we quickly found out that castles are not all they're cracked out to be. We ended up sharing a room with 4 people that's only a bit bigger than my bathroom. To make things worse, we peeked in other rooms and they were HUGE with fireplaces and balconies. I'll leave castles to fairytales any day, only modern conveniences for me from now on.

However, I did appreciated the tour of a 400 year old building where they showed us the process the local vineyards owner takes to make wine. It was very cool because the process hasn't changed that much from centuries ago. That night, Contiki held a "shock your mom" party in the wine cellar-turned club of the chateau. There were a lot of guys in dresses and girls pretending to be pregnant. The majority of our tour is from Australia and they sure know how to party :)

Joan