Time Flies...

We are at Chateau Alteville in Lorraine, France. Last evening we had champaign with a group of six ladies from Spain and then dinner with three couples from Paris, two of which are here for a bike race. They will go for 80 km and expect to finish in two hours. I told them that they are luckey my brother in law is not in the race...

We have been in France for almost two weeks. It has been hard to find rooms in towns a reasonable distance apart, so we have been improvising with buses to places to sleep off the trail. The most interesting improvisation was after a very hot day of walking (did I mention that it is finally summer, it has been in the high 30s the last few days). We walked into Laitre Sous Amance looking for the hotel and asked the first person we saw in our terrible French, O a l hotel. We got a strange look, but a second person was called in to consult. The second person a French farmer named Remy Simonin motioned us to follow him. He was very persistent and so his father, the first person we saw, and Rhonda and I followed him into his farm yard right in town, where he called his son to come out. The son, Tomas, 23 and just back from a year in Australia, proceeded to answer our questions. No hotel, no retaurant, no cafe.

Meanwhile beer appeared on the table in the yard and glasses. Mama Marie Pierre, and son Lucas were called and they asked if we would like to try Remys homemade pate with some bread, and then, hey, how about lunch? Out it came, fired eggs, tomatoe and mozerella salad, bread, cornucorns made with farm produce, as was the pate, radishes and finally wine that Tomas earned by helping with a friends harvest in Burgundy. The family sat and watched us eat, as they had finished their dejuener, and asked questions and told us about the community of 350 where they live. We were asked to stay for dinner and for the night. Needless to say dinner was wonderful, Emilie the daughter, who arrived from U of Nancy for dinner and Vincent a collegue of Marie Pierres from the library in Nancy, who came to help zith the interrpreting joined us. It was a spendid evening finished with pear brandy made from the farms pears.

The next day Ulli and Klaus Fromm picked us up in front of the church and we went off to Nancy and surrounding towns for two days and had a ball. We found rooms in Chateau Salins as the hotel had closed in another of our stopping places. The next day the Fromms went off canal walking while we cheated and did a day without packs. It felt so good we got rid of ten pounds of stuff from our packs. By the way, the new boots are really working out. The next day the Fromms headed for home and dropped our packs off for us here at Chateau Alteville so we walked again without them.

Dinner is almost ready so I have to go. We start the mountains in a couple of days. Tomorrow we head out early to beat the heat and then watch the Orange in the World Cup final.