A faux-Swiss fish massage?

I could swear we are in Switzerland already. Once we leave the vibrant and bustling Besançon (with a belly full of lunch ice-cream) we find ourselves rolling along beside Le Doubs, with vibrant green vegetation and the ground rising sharply on either side.

This is not the sleepy, rural, gently undulating France we have travelled through. This feels different. It looks different. The houses are different. The cows are different. We hear the hum of nearby, busy roads, and above, fighter jets are playing at Top Gun.

It feels like if we are not somewhere yet, we are nearly there. Let’s call it faux-Switzerland.

Our day is rather uneventful, if you call spending a few hours passing through beautiful scenery uneventful. We have a couple of short butt-nutters to climb (it is faux Switzerland after all) one of which does beat me so I have to walk up. There’s a bit of an Orangina drought until we find a open bakery about 15km from home where all the hot and thirsty cyclists seem to congregate.

We’re going well. The day is almost done. There’s only around 10km to go. And then … “Route Barée”.

What to do? Ignore it? Take the signposted déviation? Neil goes ahead a little to see what the issue might be. A young boy comes up to me and says, “Madame,” and a lot of other words I don’t get. I tend to think he is telling me we won’t get through.

We take the déviation. It’s not a nice one. At first it seems OK, gentle and signposted. But then the signposts disappear and when we consult Google maps, the only way to go is up. We (or should I say I) huff up a long and steep – I reckon 8% at its worst – road for about 2km, and then down a pretty awful pot-holed and gravelly road until we hit a decent tarmac road and roll home into L’Isle-sur-le-Doubs.

Our home tonight is not much to write home about. We have an apartment in this tiny town, right next to a busy railway line. The apartment is large, but not well-appointed. We had to request linen (at extra cost), and on arrival found a pile of folded and damp sheets and towels on a bench. There were others in the closet, but they are the type of towels and sheets you get from your mother when you first move out of home. We scratch enough together to make up a bed and have towels for a badly needed shower.

There’s one place in town to have a beer and one place to get food nearby. It’s take-away pizza for us tonight. At least we have a table to sit at to eat!

The high point of town is the multi-purpose shop where you can get your fish a massage and new lingerie. It’s for sale, so perhaps an opportunity for a budding entrepreneur ????.

Stats for today:

• Distance: 67.64km
• Climb: 235m
• Average speed: 17.1km/h
• Average temperature: 26C
• Moving time: 3:57:26
• See our ride on Strava

The beer picture

At the end of a day’s ride, our tradition is to enjoy a beer, and to photograph it for posterity. Today’s beer picture was taken at what seemed to be the only place in town where you could get a beer, and only steps away from the only place in town where you could get food (take away pizza).

Along the way today: