Really old shoes and a lake

After alot of "discussion" last night and this morning about what we should be doing today, we finally headed out the door at 11:30 to find something to do, within 1 hour's drive.  We ended up back at the city of Romans, where we looked through their huge Shoe Museum.  It was pretty interesting, once we found the shoes! :-)  (Signage in the museum was confusing and they had all these extra displays of other stuff at the beginning... very strange museum layout, and no one around to ask.)

Anyway, after wandering the rooms and listening to our audio guides, we found some pretty old footwear... like from the Roman age and mummified shoes too.  Some of them were pretty ridiculous, and we couldn't even imagine people wore them on their feet.  It was interesting to read about royalty and rich people binding up feet so they wouldn't grow, or would grow deformed, and then they would have to have special shoes made for them.  Crazy.

Enough about shoes, I'm bored talking about them.

From there we found a lake for the kids to swim in... believe me, we have been on a constant quest for places to swim on this trip.  And even though we find lovely rivers all over the place, they aren't suitable for swimming.  There have been disappointed kids on more than one occasion, when at the end of the day they  say "but we didn't get to swim!  You promised!"  Yes, we have found the swimming place in Pont en Royans, but the water is super cold and it's really just for jumping off rocks and cooling off.  And also a waterfall,.. same situation.

This was an actual lake, with warm water and it didn't cost $40 to use!  (Did I mention the manmade lake that you had to pay to go in, closeby? )

We stayed for a few hours, then took, yet another, scenic drive home, through the little country roads.  Stopped briefly at a super old Abby in a small town.  The kids groaned "not another ancient church... they all look the same!".  Lucky for them, it wasn't open.

The long awaited Chez Dom pizza happened tonight!!  It was really good... baked in an open flame oven, and done in about 5 minutes.  My favourite was the pizza that had a cream sauce, goat cheese and honey.  Soo good!

While we waited for our pizza, we went across the road to a little shop that sells local products.  She gave me a sampling of a dessert wine that is made from green walnuts (walnuts that aren't ready to be eaten yet... but very good for drinking!!).