TO DôLE
250903: Another very good day. Off west we went over the wonderfully wide River Rhône and straight into scenery very reminiscent of certain slightly gentler areas of north west Scotland, with treed hillsides in parts and some wide valley bottoms. Glorious may well be the word I'm looking for.
In the Cluse des Hôpitaux we stopped for breakfast. A railway line ran through this modest gorge and I walked across the road to film the next train. None came.
A very big lorry came up the valley and sounded its horn. I looked around and a little old man in a little-old-man-type car had skittered to a halt in the layby. For going too slowly he'd been blasted off the road by the lorry driver.
The old man sat there for nearly a minute collecting his wits, (an increasingly difficult task, of course, once the ageing process has taken hold). I felt sorry for him, but I had some sympathy too for the lorry driver knowing, as the driver of a Slightly Under-Powered Vehicle, how much I value momentum and how hard it is to regain it on a climb.
I came back to the van and we started on our breakfast. Three trains went through before I'd finished.
In Rambert I overshot a turning for an obvious-looking shortcut I'd planned, but it didn't matter. We circled the little town. It could so easily have fitted into any valley in Mid Wales. Finding the single-track road we climbed up the steep and wooded valley side and eventually reached a rolling plateau around 700 - 1100m od.
We could still very easily have been somewhere in Mid Wales. Traffic was very, very scarce, but I had once to pull onto a grass verge and stop to allow an approaching vehicle to pass.
Hmm. Stuck in 4th! We were facing very slightly downhill on soft grassy ground. I tried to set off and stalled, (of course), but I'd been pulling on the gear lever and the shudder and shake were sufficient to free it.
And off we went again.
The roads widened and straightened and with the wind behind we bowled along with the hightop acting as a sail.
Through a gap in the hedge alongside which we'd stopped in the previous photograph.
They hadn't chosen their lampposts very well, had they.
Across the road was a filling station where I asked the cashier which department we were in. He pointed in the direction of each as I guessed. Jura? Non. Savoie? Non. (Getting desperate), Haute Savoie? Non.
He told me we were in the Ain region and that it was better than any of the others I'd mentioned. I must admit that this area was fabulous and I think I really have come around to preferring to be in wooded mountains rather than in the harsh extremes of scant vegetation, bare rock and / or high altitude snow.
Climbing up a recently built road we stopped in a sun-baked layby where originally the old skinny road had turned a sharp corner over a bridge in a narrow side valley. I strolled down the old road thinking that it would make a marvellous overnight stopping place, (for those who feel no need for mains electricity).
Birch and willow trees were growing up through the old tarmac and the bridge had been removed.
Another few miles and I was quite suddenly feeling very tired. We stopped for a roadside coffee, then after a few more miles on the plateau we crept steeply down behind a very slow tractor into the town of Lon-le-Saunier, the administrative capital of the Jura region. What a dump, (it seemed to be), and the campsite we'd planned to use in the suburbs was decidedly grim-looking.
Off we went again, now heading for Dôle where M. Michelin's map indicated a campsite, but it wasn't in our book and we'd no idea whether it would be open or not.