We arrived literally in village France, Louan at the southern tip of the champagne region, east of…read moreParis. We are an hour drive from Disney; its built on beet fields in the Marne valley N/E of Paris. We're in a 1 bed, 1 bath cottage within a campsite forest booked via Yelloh. They promise an open air hotel experience and it was delivered in spades. We've also booked a second open air hotel stay with Yelloh for the end part of our holiday, as we go home via Normandy. We're here for 5 days having arrived a day early. Despite this and even with hundreds of guests already here a comfy room was found and we settled in. Two bed cottages are also available. No caravans allowed; you arrive with a suitcase as the various pre built tents remain on site. It looks a bit like a Jurassic park movie set in places. Doesn't matter if you are a solo camper or a force of 2/300 as there's room for all. When full over 700 people are accommodated. The forest is very old and the huge campsite is superb. Some of the trees on site that surround us are 300 feet tall or more, so they've been here many generations. The site has a restaurant, serving good pizzas eat in & take out, starting @ £6 meals including steak & chips @ £10, duck @ £12 chicken curry @ £10; a cafe with the usual soft drinks, beers including Desperado @ £3, which is what's in my glass, and not so good tasting espresso @ £1.10, a well stocked shop, indoor/outdoor pools, a kids play park, archery, sand pits, sunbeds, bicycles, placid donkeys, chatty ducks, goats, ponies, & demented chickens. There's even wire cables that hang across treetops with ledges atop trees so you can harness yourself, hook on and fly between the trees over the tents & cottages even across the open air pool. There's mostly pay wifi @ £15 for 4 days with it free in the cafe for an hour. This is a nuisance as you have to be inside the cafe. acquire a code then text the code to a French mobile number then it may work and when it does you get an hour. Mine still didn't log in after I followed the process so I had to get help from one of the uber friendly (all aged 20 something) staff it took him ten more minutes to succeed. Yelloh note: hotels usually give wifi free. An extra few words about the staff: their genuine friendliness, good English, desire to please is fantastic and a special thanks to Christophe & the team for making great memories for us. The staff also dealt with a well attended wedding, yes that's right an open air evening wedding by the pool, with an excellent opera singer included. Elsewhere there was a Christian evangelical camping group of about 100 who joyfully sang praise to their lord for 2 evenings and were all pleasant gentle people to be near. Also Toyota held a staff conference and sales promotion with literally 100 new cars and as many staff but they kept themselves to a quiet corner of this mega site. There were representatives from a drug company there at a conference. Then you had the rest of the human family: mums & dads with kids, hikers, bikers, joggers, lone fishermen, elderly retired couples & people like us who now fall somewhere between family with kids and the elderly retired. Outside this open air hotel there are a few champagne caves about 3 to 4 miles away, nestled in some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe. Hard to believe in the midst of this beauty & idyll that Paris with about 12 million people is nearby. Thanks to Christophe's guidance we bought our champagne from Barrat Masson in Villenauxe la Grande. If you get here go see the chapel as it's stunning and dominates the town. The BM's are two years into the three year cycle to being fully organic champagne grape growers. It's a man and wife effort who produce 13,000 bottles a year - to put this in context Moët Chandon & Mercier each probably hit 20 million annually - our organic family have two champagne types one an extra dry Chardonnay only (90% of their production is this grape the remaining ten is Pinot Noir.) I bought the latter. The largest town close by (25 mins drive away) is Provins. Mother Nature too is well in evidence in the campsite with plants, shrubs, birds & bugs aplenty and she gave us a powerful thunderstorm last night, without much rain, for over an hour. It was explosive, really shook the cottage, small wonder as the day time temperatures easily exceed 33 degrees. One more thought here this site may well have has five to six hundred happy humans running about it but come 10pm each night it's eerily quiet; it stays that way for about 12 hours As I close this review surrounded by the sound of birds singing, the sounds of kids in the pool area and I can smell the waft of food and hear it sizzling on hundreds of barbecues around me as village France prepares to cook their Sunday dinner outdoors on hot coals with baguette style bread, cheeses, wine and beer aplenty on the tables. Oh well if you can't beat them.
