Stephen took us to a hotel where he had been for a meeting during the day for some dinner- tuna puffs with a spicy tomato and onion sauce. Very tasty! We spent a while there listening to the band play traditional folk music and watching some adventurous souls dance.

Stephen has a great collection of LPs and music fills the house!

The next day continued to be drizzly and cloudy. It took us a while to get moving, but Stephen gave us a route to follow for an afternoon drive, the mountain crest route. Along the way we visited three lakes, Vert (which we walked some way down to but gave up as it was a bit steep and slippery), then Blanc and Noir.

At Lake Noir we enjoyed an afternoon tea of coffee and blackberry tart. I am not used to seeing such large serves of sweets! Everywhere we have seen cakes, tarts etc they have been huge servings, so a little restraint is called for in relation to them!

There was a large group for dinner that night. Jules and Julie ( from Paris), Jenny (from Canada, with a dry sense of humour), Ruth (from Germany - travelling for as long as she can and great company), Stephen, us and another woman from France whose name I did not catch and did not talk with as she didn't understand English. Dinner that night was a new experience for us -raclette.

A raclette is an oval-shaped top element electric warming plate for heating cheese (and in Germany, other foods to eat with the cheese, such as chopped bacon and onions). Each person has a triangular shaped dish on which to put their cheese slice, then insert it into the raclette until the desired level of melting is reached. The cheese is poured onto boiled potatoes, other ingredients added to taste (e.g. bacon) then eaten. With some salad, this is a delicious meal, that had us working out how we could do this at home without a raclette.

We have eaten a lot of cheese in France, but this night was a revelation and celebration of cheese. In France, slices of cheese are very thick compared to those we have in Australia and few would contemplate eating us much as we all did that night! Stephen commented that it was amazing that French people didn't get fat despite the amount of cheese they ate! We are so glad to have been introduced to raclette - we will try to do this at home! A bit of a late night, in very good company!

Our next day of travelling in the area was also drizzly. We had decided before we left Australia that we would take any opportunity to do things that we couldn't do back home. One thing we definitely couldn't do is go to Roman ruins. We had heard about some ruins near a place called Grand in France, so we decided that since we were only a few hours away that we would go there even though it was raining quite hard at Gerardmer. Grand was obviously a bigger place in Roman times. It now has a poulation of 500 people. Nineteen hundred years ago it was a big enough town for them to build an amphitheatre able to seat 17000. While much of the amphitheatre had been used as a quarry after about 500 AD, it is still possible to see the overall structure, cages for animals and the locations of various classes of seats. It was interesting to note that the basics of stadium construction used nearly 2000 years ago are still used today, just on a larger scale. Many of the features there are replicated at Adelaide Oval.
In the town itself is a mosaic tile floor of about 225 square metres. Considering its age - more than 1600 years - and the fact that it was discovered under about 3 metres of soil and rubble, it is in remarkably good condition. It is further evidence of the wealth that some Romans brought to an outpost of their empire.
Also remarkable was the fact that the Romans created an underground water system to not only supply buildings but to reduce damage from flooding.
So, was it worth six hours driving in the rain? In my opinion, yes it was.

The day we left, the weather improved, with a few patches of blue sky and some sun! We were pleased because we were hoping for better weather to take some photos of the lake at Gerardmer.
Photos taken, we were on our way again.

On our way to Strasbourg, we saw a castle in the distance and I wondered if it was the Koenigsbourg castle Martine had told us about. It was! We took a detour to it but it was worth the effort! What a castle!
When we arrived, after driving up higher and higher into the hills, we parked the car and still needed to walk further uphill to get to the castle. We decided to walk around the castle and some of its ruins first (about 25mins). We didn't see anyone else along the way! As we were completing the walk, we arrived at the entrance to the castle and paid to go in.
It took about an hour and a half to explore and we are so glad we did! It was a real fortress, with archers slits in the walls, cannons up in the tower-an amazing sight!
Before continuing our journey, we stopped in the town below that had some great examples of medieval houses.