Small Bears "En Vacances" Part 2 - Wine Tasting!

When we woke up on our first day afloat on the cruise ship, we were still on the move.  Polar explained that we had been cruising all night up the River Saone and were heading for a place called Chalon-sur-Saone. 

"We're going to visit the town of Beaune when we get there," she explained.  "It's supposed to be very pretty and it's in the wine-growing area, so we're doing some wine-tasting too.  I can take one of you in the Bear Bag with my camera."

We bears discussed who would go and agreed that I would do this visit, but Endon would go into Lyon the next day, while Hanley would ride the Train d'Ardeche on Sunday. 

"You are good bears to agree to share," said Polar.  "There will be plenty of adventures for all of you on this journey."

From the coach, I had some super views of the vineyards and I also spotted a canal, which was the Canal du Centre.  Polar says it's part of a system linking the Saone to the Loire.  I wonder if there are French boating bears? 

After a nice drive through the countryside, we reached Beaune, which was very, very pretty indeed.  Polar and Grizzly decided to visit the Hotel Dieu museum, which was a chapel and hospital built in the 1440s, providing free medical care from the nuns who lived there to the poor people of the town.

You can see that the roof is covered in beautiful, colourful tiles on one side, although our guide said it was the plain slate roof that was the most expensive part when it was built.

I thought the beds looked very comfortable and was tempted to try bouncing on one, but Polar told me to be a good bear and be respectful as we were in a very historic building.

After our visit to the museum it was time to explore more of the town and join the rest of our group to visit the wine cellar.  Polar took lots of pictures because the town was so pretty.

It was a very warm day and I was starting to get rather hot in the Bear Bag, so it was a relief when we went down into the cool cellars.  Being a bear, I could smell lots of wine even before we went into the shop, but even the humans could smell it in the cellars.

Our guide, Ursula (a good Bear name!) knew a lot about wine and, helped by one of the men from the shop, gave all of our group sipping samples of white and then red wines to try, showing us how to test the bouquet (smell) of the wine before tasting it.

I think that we bears would make excellent wine testers, because we have such a good sense of smell.  I found it very easy to tell the different wines apart, although even Polar (who has quite a poor sense of smell) found that she could tell the difference in smell between the wines we were sampling.

I enjoyed climbing on some of the wine barrels and sniffing the wines inside them, but my favourite thing in the cellar were the tasty little biscuits we had between wines to help cleanse our palettes.

Hanley and Endon were looking out for us when we the coach brought us back to the boat, just in time for a lovely lunch!  We cast off soon afterwards, and we enjoyed looking out of the window at the lovely scenery and interesting buildings.

Then we came to the first lock we had seen in daylight.  It looked very big, but we would see even bigger locks later in the week.  Our big boat only just fitted into this one!

The top gate slid out of the way, but there were mitred bottom gates, like big versions of the sort of lock gates we are used to seeing at home.  You can see that the lock-keeper has a very smart control tower!

Polar noticed there was a nice little pool on the stern of the boat.  It was starting to get very hot, so we decided to have naps in our nice cool cabin with Grizzly, while Polar had a dip.

But we didn't do very much napping, as there were too many interesting things to look out from our window - and soon, we heard that it was time for afternoon tea!

"We are going to be very fat little bears by the end of this holiday!" I warned the others, but fortunately we would a little bit of exercise during our trips out, and I will tell you all about Endon's first trip out in my next post.