I cycle through the Jura Region of Eastern France. The main centres were Arbois, Lons-Le-Saunier and Poligny, with mountains, forests, and the Ain river gorge in between. I continue on down the River Ain to its confluence with the Rhône and then on to the city of Lyon. In Lyon I wait 6 days for my bike to be repaired.
Don’t forget you can zoom-in to see the detail
Monday 22 August 2022. Montigny le Roi to Auxonne |137 km|
It was a beautiful morning and an early start – I didn’t want to be caught loitering around and having to explain why I hadn’t paid the camping fee. Cold but clear, warming up to the low 20’s by afternoon.
There were some minor navigational issues when my GPS took me out of the Meuse valley and onto the ridges of the Jura to the east, but after 50km at Darmarien, where I stopped for a picnic, I came across a Voie Vert that follows the Canal between Champagne and Bourgogne. That seemed a logical way to go and so I followed it all the way to the River Saône and then easily got onto the Voie Bleue to Auxonne. Easy-peasy.
This section of the ‘Canal Entre Champagne et Bourgogne’ that I was on has been long-abandoned by barges and even pleasure craft. The locks don’t work anymore and the canal itself is mostly full of weeds. The towpath surface wasn’t great either, but at least it was still okay to cycle on.
Coming in to Auxonne I had reason to feel happy I don’t travel around Europe in a Campervan: there was a huge paddock-full of them just outside of town all crowded together in the mud. I don’t think I’d like to spend my vacation like that.
Mind you, my campground wasn’t much better, even though it seems to be another popular stopping-off point on the cycle touring calendar. A Dutch couple, Vim and his wife who were doing the same trip as I but in the opposite direction, were very friendly and Vim spent some time with me going over his maps to point out the best routes all the way to the Mediterranean.
The lazy guys manning the kiosk/ reception were very casual – they had a few miserable packaged food items for sale that I passed on, but were selling drinks, including beers, for only €1 each. They also sold icecreams, so that was my dinner – ice creams and beer, and oh, there was no toilet paper in the loo either, which I discovered the hard way.
Tuesday 23 August 2022. Auxonne to Lons-le-Saunier |112 km|
Well this was pretty much the perfect day of cycling.
First, it was 40 kilometres through rolling green countryside on quiet back roads to the Doubs River. But after only 1 kilometre upstream, I left the Doubs and headed into the Forest of Chaux along almost impossible dark forest pathways strewn with broken branches and with steep inclines, as well as along well-made dirt logging trails for 30 km to the picturesque town of Arbois. The Henri Maire Vin Fou signs are a feature billboard in every town for about a 200-km radius of Arbois.
Arbois must be one of the prettiest towns I’ve seen in France. At least that’s what I wrote in my diary at the time, so it must be true. But…thinking back on it now almost a year later I can’t actually even remember the place so it can’t have made too much of a long-lasing impression.
The going was very hilly then through the Jura Massif, and I snuck into a campground at Poligny to recharge the batteries for 40 minutes, and then just made it the 25 km further on along the flat and straight but very busy D1083 road to Lons-Le-Saunier.
The campsite at Lon-Le-Saunier, Camping La Marjorie had too many rules and regulations for the guests, but it is well situated and well laid out as you can see from their website. It even has an attractive swimming pool.
But La Marjorie is run by amateurs and I think they must be new to the business. I counted 9 relatives, plus 4 or 5 of their kids, who kept walking in and out behind the counter helping themselves to whatever provisions took their fancy from the well-stocked store. And I’m getting told off big time for standing at the provision-buying part of the counter instead of the food-ordering part!
Wednesday 24 August 2022. Lons-Le-Saunier to Poncin |126 km|
The weather is heating up now. Yesterday and the day before were both swimming days by late afternoon with temperatures up to the mid-20s but today we got up to 30°C and there was nowhere to swim. And it was a sweaty arduous day too, with lots of hills to cope with.
I got away from Lons-le-Saunier nice and early and soon found a patisserie in the next town to get the day’s food cache, but of course it wasn’t anywhere as nice-looking as several others I came across later in the day. That’s alway the way, isn’t it. One never know what’s ahead.
For most of the day I was following the River Ain through its narrow gorge and alongside its reservoir on a main tourist road but unfortunately a ‘deviation’ downstream of the dam at the Pont de Lect sur L’Ain made me backtrack north and up out of the gorge again – 12 km at 6%, then straightaway 8 km at 5% followed by 5 km at 8% made for 25 km of tough climbing.
The batteries were flat again after only 60 km due to that arduous climb out of L’Ain gorge and I was soon desperately hunting around for somewhere, anywhere, to charge up.
I ended up having to shame the woman working in the Mairie (town council building) of Lavancia-Epercy into letting me stay for 1½ hours, sitting on the stoop outside in the heat, while she ‘graciously’ allowed me to put the batteries on charge in the air-conditioned reception area just inside the front door. No, she wasn’t at all friendly even though I was obsequiously bowing and scraping the whole time to try to get on her good side.
That recharge got me comfortably to Poncin. Along the way, I had to wait for 40 minutes behind a police barricade while the annual Tour de Doubs cycle race passed by. It was then that I first noticed my bike’s Gates CDX carbon fibre drive belt was delaminating badly and the sprocket ridges were all full of cracks.
I thought I’d better head straight for the nearest big city, which is Lyon, to get it attended to because these drive belts are not a common item and breaking down anywhere out here and trying to get hold of a new one would be a challenge.
The campground at Poncin, Camping de la Valleé de l’Ain, was another one of those run by people who simply don’t care. Their website by the way is a glaring example of false and deceptive advertising. I had to wait around for an hour for the enormous woman who ran the joint to appear to check me in. A resident (a permanent caravan-dweller living on site) warned me I’d better wait for her before setting up too as she can be a bit irrascible, even though I could readily see where the tent section wad. There was a group of cyclists there already.
Soon after I artived, a middle-aged female walker (well, 40s I suppose, is that middle-aged?) harnessed to the shafts of a luggage cart she was pulling, also arrived looking completely done-in from heat exhaustion. Against all advice, she proceeded to pitch her tent in the premium drive-through shaded caravan spot right at the camp’s entrance after having minutely examined the whole campground to pick the best spot. That shows a complete lack of social awareness, and we all knew there’d be trouble!
Sure enough, the fat lady flounced in, an hour later than her note on the door said she’d be back, all agitated and in a rush. I think she doubles as a real estate agent. She was certainly dressed like one.
Anyway, I was first in line and got the friendly treatment. She was only too happy to check me in, but still was a bit testy with it, I thought. She seemed to be oversensitive to criticism. But our hapless lady walker – well she really copped a blast. There was a huge argument about her having to shift sites that escalated quickly to the point where the walker was told to pack up all her stuff and leave. It was already 5.30pm by this time and there was simply nowhere else for her to go. She’d be lucky to be able to cover 4 km an hour.
But both she and her royal-fatness were equally obstinate, and in the end that poor woman did just pack up all her stuff and trudge off. We all felt sorry for her and offered to put her up for the night on our own sites, and at one stage even contemplated chipping-in for a hotel room for her, but of she went with a point to prove, I’m sure, and we all had to worry about her welfare for the rest of the evening.
Thursday 25 August 2022. Poncin to Meyzieu |93 km|
Another stinking hot overcast day with temperatures up into the low 30s. I rode well covered up with my long-sleeved granny shirt and boy scout/ camel driver’s hat on – by no means an attractive look, but it kept the cosmic rays off my face, so what the hell.
The Ain à Velo route terminates at the confluence of the Rivers Ain and Rhône and after that you’d normally ride on along the Rhône River into Lyon (as I had done 4 months ago but in the opposite direction). But due to my grave concerns about my drive belt’s imminent failure, I thought it prudent to push on to Lyon by the most direct route, and GPSsed myself there via the vast industrial precinct in the east of the city.
I really didn’t want to push the bike too hard – that’s my excuse anyway – so I went towards the nearest campground showing on both my iPhone and the Bosch eBike app, that goes by the name of Les Voiles du Grand Large (The Sails by the Open Sea!) and bills itself as this huge recreational complex on the edge of a lake.
Well, it turns out they don’t even do tent sites, or caravans or campers for that matter. The only choices are ‘chalets’ or hotel rooms, and the only option they still had left for me was a chalet.
I admit the chalet was quite good, but what a dump the complex is in general. It was like an open prison, surrounded by a tall chain wire fence with only one manned barricade for an entrance, and that was on the other side to the lake (and hence no access to the water).
I had to pay a €200 deposit for a one night stay in a room that ‘only’ cost €110, which I wasn’t too happy about. I did get it back the next day, though, after waiting at reception while they sent a cleaner round to check I hadn’t stolen or destroyed anything. They had a captive audience – no possibility of any sustenance unless you booked into their expensive restaurant, which was also booked out unless I went in to the early sitting at 5.30pm.
Well, I did go for that early meal, a Poké Bowl and a bottle of Rosé for €57. It was my birthday after all. And even though they only deigned to give me a back seat next to the waiters’ station and well away from the opulent terrace, I did have water glimpses. Cheers!
Friday 26 August 2022. Meyzieu to Lyon |24 km|
The ride into downtown Lyon this morning passed through some interesting ‘olde worlde’ neighbourhoods. I’m not at all fazed at finding my way through complicated built-up areas now, as I can rely completely on Ziggy’s ability to navigate in the suburbs. It’s in the open country that he had problems.
The first bike shop I tried – and there are lots of bike shops in Lyon – was unhelpful but at the second one, En Selle Marcel 6 ème I had much better luck. There, Leo was very keen, knowledgeable and helpful and tracked down the distributor for Gates in Paris who said they would send out a replacement belt in ‘3 or 4 days’.
OK, that was longer than I expected [I ordered this computer from Sydney at 11.00 am on Wednesday and it arrived at my place at 08.00 am on Thursday – that’s 900 km in 21 hours! Paris to Lyon is only 500 km. And it was going to take 4 days! I guess that’s France for you].
Leo suggested I stay at Ho 36 in the district of La Guillotière, not far away from his store in avenue du Maréshal de Saxe. Ho 36 is the hottest backpackers hostel in Lyon, he assured me, and something of a cyclist’s mecca as well – a pretty cool place to hang out, apparently. I got all excited about that.
The day-manager, I guess you’d call him, when I checked in at Ho36 (and that’s how it’s always referred – Ho36) was Mosh, a Portuguese backpacker who also speaks perfect US English (for all the Germans and Scandinavians), plus French, Spanish and Russian. He was at first super-friendly, but then mainly only to all the girl packpackers, I soon began to notice, and by the third day he was pretty much ignoring me. I was given one of their better private rooms on the top (4th) floor for €75 per night.
I have to say Leo’s recommendation was a good one – close to his shop, to the river and to the scenic old town on the other side of the river; plenty of interesting cafes and boulangeries and cheap food stores nearby. La Guillotière is a seedy-looking but a safe enough neighbourhood, with a real Afro- and Middle-eastern vibe to it, situated on the bohemian left bank (La Rive Gauche) of the Rhōne opposite the city centre. Lyon’s Old University and new Aquatic Centre are located there also.
Saturday 27 August. Enforced rest day in Lyon |no travel|
I woke up at 6.30 am after a broken sleep and with a sore back from the soft bed, hung around til 09.00 and then tried the local shops. Only the boulangerie was open, but that was enough – a big slice of flan for breaky – then at 10.0 0 am another food foray – to the just-opened Asian mini-market this time – to secure a few cans of Japanese iced coffee. Bliss!
I cycled back to En Selle Marcel and left my bike there, since we didn’t know exactly when the new belt would be arriving and the workshop might want to get started on it before they could contact me to bring it over. Then at Leo’s suggestion I went for a walk across to the central part of the city to check out Grimpeurs House which is a well-known cyclists hang-out in Lyon.
It’s more for the lycra brigade, I feel, rather than the long-distance transport-mule kind of dollard rider I’d become, but Grimpeurs (a reference to climbing specialists in the Tour de France) is perfectly ok in allowing anyone to hang-out there using their internet, so long as they can keep supplying you with an endless stream of their expensive pastries and sandwiches and coffees. A bit too up-market for me! I did buy one of their faux-vintage Mercier caps as a momento though. Am I a Grimpeur now? Nope.
I then went across the ‘other’ river, the Saône, into Vieux Lyon, the Old, or Rennaisance, City, with its narrow cobbled streets and up-market tourist shops, as well as its famous bouchon restaurants, well known as the most authentic style of Lyonnaise Cuisine.
Now here’s the thing: Some a*#^hole prick tried to mug me as I was crossing the Saône bridge – and in broad daylight on a busy Saturday morning too! I reacted quickly and yelled out <<Au secours!! Voleur!!>> at the top of my lungs as he went for me, and ran into the middle of the slow-moving bridge traffic (but do you think anyone would let me in their car? No!).
The would-be robber took a wild swing at me but barely connected and quickly took off running. A fellow pedestrian, a Chinese woman, who I’d just walked past and who saw it all happen, said he had some kind of short-bladed weapon like a box-cutter and that I was lucky he only nicked my shirt.
I deduce from all this that his plan was to barge in to some unsuspecting victim and accuse them of running in to him and knocking what he was carrying out of his hand, and then, as the victim was apologising profusely and bending down to help pick up his stuff, he would stand in over them closely from behind and slash the victim’s back pocket to relieve them of their wallet. (The ‘stuff” by the way, was a rubber ball that looked about the size of the inner windings of a golf ball).
So his target had to be (a): a male (ie. someone with a back pocket), and (b): an old codger like myself who wouldn’t be expected to put up a fight. A brilliant plan, except I’d already clocked him lining me up, and he was a bit slow in the execution department. Plus the rubber ball bit was a dead give-away. Pays to keep alert, eh?
And anyway the wallet was a decoy – nothing in it. [But I did have my expensive Olympus OMD E MkIII mirrorless camera (and even more valuable lens) with me, so he could have gone for that instead]. By the look of him, I’d say he was a Roma Gypsy. Yep, definitely a Roma.
I then had to quickly get back to En Selle Marcel to pay for the new Gates belt using my credit card (Leo was having trouble approving it on in their system as they don’t have an account with Gates, and this way I got to avoid Marcel’s mark-up as well) otherwise I’d have lost another 2 days on the delivery if we’d waited for Leo’s bosses to sort it all out on the Monday. So, thanks for that Leo.
In general, I found the architecture too grandiose and baroque, and the statues too baroque and grotesque to include an over-abundance of pictures of the city in the blog. My tastes in tourism run more to the quirky or human-side of things, if you know what I mean. Here’s a few examples: Duck-on-bum = Quirky (even though statue grotesque); tits-and-horses-imagery of justifable war = Grotesque; Cartoon = Quirky.
While I was at it, I also bought a light-weight Goretex rain jacket (for €220) and discarded 5 kg of “stuff” I didn’t really need anymore, the rules being: if I hadn’t used it more than once on this trip, or it was the more crappy version of something else that served just as well, it got chucked. Ho36 has a counter in the common-room where cyclists can recycle all their unwanted stuff, so that’s where it went.
Sunday 29 August 2022. Still in Lyon |no travel|
It was a hot day, up to the low 30s, and I went for a long walk through Vieux Lyon and up to the Basilica (grotesque) at the top of the hill of 800 steps. Meh.
Monday 30 August 2022. Lyon |no travel|
Another hot day, this time humid and overcast. I bought a handlebar mount for the iPhone for €19 so I could navigate in real time to any destination the Bosch GPS wasn’t aware of (like, most of them) and also a pair of ‘sockettes’, since I’d just chucked out a couple of pairs of old socks.
I tried out the daily ‘menu complet’ at a Bouchon restaurant in Vieux Lyon called Bouchon Lyonnaise Chez Marie that had a set menu lunch for €11.50. It was really great too – basically the same pork and veg I’d get at the Sherlock Holmes in Melbourne for $25, except more of a stew and ofal instead of roast pork. Oh, OK, nothing like it! (But really really tasty anyway).
I am beginng to notice there are a lot of bike shops in Lyon, and they range from the Porsche-showroom type right down to gloomy ateliers in narrow back alleyways (the best ones). En Selle Marcel is up near the top of the range.
And another thing – I’ve never noticed such a preponderance of eBikes among the biking set – must be almost 50%, I reckon. But the really big thing here in Lyon is eScooters – so many more than I’ve ever seen anywhere else, often with dad (or mum) and the kid on board hanging on grimly, or just the adult with a huge bag of groceries at their feet, or a couple of teenagers (not at their feet; instead of). And not a helmet in sight of course.
Let me know if you figure out how to put pictures side-by-side in WordPress,will ya?
Tuesday 31 august 2022. Lyon |no travel|
Well, according to the DHL tracking data, my Gates belt left The Nederlands at 11.30 pm last night. It figures that the Dutch are the masters of logistics in Europe, and that’s where a US Company would choose to site its distribution centre, even though we ordered it from a Parisian distributor.
So now it’s at least another full day of just sitting around Ho36 in Lyon. Which got me thinking: the recent renovation and modernisation of Ho36 is a triumph of form over function, as only the French can pull off (well, and the Italians too I suppose). Black walls in the rooms and dim zonal lighting? What were they thinking?
They made me shift rooms at Ho36. They’re telling me that when I’d booked-in, I’d been told the room was only available for 4 days (not strictly true, Mosh initially said only 3 days, but then got back to me later and extended it to 5 days), but, well, my gear was already all moved out by then (they did it when I’d slipped out for my morning coffees) to the make-shift room they’d cobbled together in the groundfloor courtyard.
The only source of enough light (dim zonal lighting, remember) was through the toilet window, but when I pulled back the black curtain, there were people dining at their tables not 1m away looking down onto me. Not nice. For them.
Wednesday 31 August 2022. Lyon |No travel|
Will today finally be the day my bike gets fixed – the part is now actually in Lyon as of 09.30 am this morning according to DHL tracking. So I was already on tenderhooks by the time I got my by-now daily fix of caffeine at Lidl (2 cans of cold milk coffee) near the university, and waited for the news.
I had to commit to another day’s stay at Ho36 barely an hour before I got the good news that, yes, my bike is now indeed fixed and I can come pick it up.
I hurried over and picked it up at 12.30pm. The belt cost €81.76 (I’d paid directly) and Marcel only charged me €20 for the work in replacing it. I know it’s easy enough to do, but they had also thoroughly cleaned the bike and bled the brakes and generally gave it a good looking-over, so I was mighty pleased about that. Well done guys.
– ends –
Day 45: 2022 in Europe so far: 4,701 km in 42 days of cycling
Nights in hotels 22
Night on ferry 1
Nights in tent 24
Bike maintenance:
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- Rohloff oil change (Toulouse) km 0 (20,505 km on bike)
- Repairs to rear kickstand (Toulouse)
- 12 punctures:
- 2 punctures rear (Toulouse to Agde): km 250
- 4 punctures front (Toulouse to Agde): km 300
- 2 punctures rear (Hull to Birtley): km 2,730
- 4 punctures rear (Alnwick to Berwick): 2,940
- 2 new tubes (Montelimar) km 780
- Two new Ortlieb Front Roller panniers (€140 Koblenz): km 1,870
- 2 sets new brake pads (£8 Boston): km 2,710
- Rear pannier rack broken; temp fix with cable ties (Bamburgh):km 3, 020
- 2 new tubes (Scremerston, UK): km 3,050
- 1 new tyre (Scremerston, UK) km 2,030
- New Gates CDX Carbon Belt (€87 Lyon): km 5,045. (25, 550 total for the belt)
- New Goretex rain jacket (€220 Lyon)
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