Author: Brian Burger

Slept in, late breakfast by recent standards, 0830. Wandered into Besançon old town, had a look around and a picnic lunch on the banks of the Doubs.

Free guided tour of Besançon’s Vauban-designed citadel, a huge fortress on one side of town and a World Heritage site. Our guide was a fluently bilingual and highly knowledgeable man playing Vauban, although when he got into some particularly interesting point he tended to give us a two-sentence English summary after going on in French for a bit.

I was actually able to follow quite a lot of his French as well, as I already know a good bit about Vauban and the fortress design of his era, and many of the specialized terms are universal – often left untranslated from Italian, actually, as they pioneered a lot of the stuff Vauban perfected and became famous for.

After the fortress tour we got roped into an overly long presentation from the regional government. Bad PowerPoint is universal, it transcends all language barriers with its completely incomprehensible awful design. The canapes afterwards were really quite good, though.

Random observation after listening to a number of people translating things for us recently: “Touristic” is not a word a native English speaker is likely to use. It crops up regularly in German and especially French translations, though.

Off to Dole tomorrow, 60km west along the Doubs River. Weather looks like it will continue hot and clear, with some chance of showers.

Short day of riding, under 40km, but a busy day nevertheless.

We left the very nice and quiet camping bungalows outside Baum-les-Dames just before 0930 and headed into the centre of town to join a bilingual guided tour by the head of the local tourism office.

Apparently the Baum in the town name comes from the Celtic word for cave (limestone hill country around here, so lots of caves) and the Dames part from the abbey that dominated the town from it’s founding in the 5th C until it’s dissolution during the French Revolution in the 1790s.

Neat compact old town centre, although much less polished than similar small towns we saw in Austria or Germany – this is a fairly working-class area of France these days.

We left Baum-les-Dames for Besançon around noon, and had a (slightly too long) tour of Besançon’s new art gallery/conservatory in the afternoon.

No riding tomorrow, our first true rest day in just over three weeks of riding. We’re staying at some sort of student hostel in Besançon, only two of us to a room in a quiet part of town, which is nice for our day off.

We’re getting a tour of the town’s famous Citadel tomorrow, which should be cool, as the town still has most of it’s Vauban-designed 17th C fortifications intact.

Long 85km day today but much more straightforward than yesterday’s mess.

On the road by 0915, picnic lunch beside a canal lock, little bit of rain to cool us off in the afternoon, and a really nice quiet place to stay, a town-run set of camping cabins just outside Baum-les-Dames.

Nice dinner in the evening arranged by the local tourism folks, good local wine, and the promise of a free guided tour of the town tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow is a very short day, only 36km into Besançon (pronounced something like “boo-ah-zon”) so we’ll make time for the Baum-les-Dames tour then wander toward Besançon.

A stream of consciousness post of things missed or that a camera simply can’t capture.

The uniform hum of multiple bike tires on pavement when you’re in a fairly tight group at a good speed.

The enterprising farmer who put a Coke vending machine, a small table and and umbrella at one corner of his barn next to the EV6.

Standard Bavarian village skyline: church steeple, construction crane, tree on pole. Repeat every three to six kilometres across most of the Bavarian part of the trip.

Bavarian men of all ages really do wear lederhosen unironically, often as part of their Sunday best, but sometimes just to cut the lawn.