To Tournus

May 15, 2022

Another fairly easy day with fair weather, fair winds and moderate terrain. We’ve been following Susan Carpenter’s journey east across the interior from Angouleme converge on us for our planned meet up in Beaune with Suzanne and János, worrying a bit about whether she’ll arrive in time and feeling a little guilty that her days are so much more challenging than ours. It’s OK though - we’re in this for the long haul and a run of shorter and easier days are a welcome respite. Susan will just have to cool her jets a bit when we get together.

And speaking of long hauls, we’re running out of France! This time next month we’ll be in Canterbury, checking out English breakfasts and surrounded by folks who more or less speak our language again. We’re catching ourselves thinking about this more often, looking again at the itinerary we planned and the bookings we made months ago to see if any last minute changes are warranted.

Not too much to say about today’s ride, except that we continue to recover and profit from our experience biking through a cottonwood haze to Lyon and Villefranche. We know better now and have drawn another inland route that takes us us away from the river and across a series of low rollers that remind us of yesterday’s ride and the day before that. Not for the first time I assure Rachael that we’ve never seen this particular village/field/vista before - it just looks like it.

Storks! I’m not clear on where and when they hang out in Western Europe, but for some reason it surprises me to see them here.

A sure sign of a freshly mown pasture - storks below, kites hovering above.

An unusual structure. A mill of some sort or a grain silo?

Image not found :( — Burgundy is a wine region, in case you hadn’t known.

On one of the ‘big’ climbs of the day, taking us up to roughly 1,000’ elevation. Toward the top we’re above the vineyards and passing through ridge-crowning woods.

Pushing up the last gruesome ascent of the day, which maxes out at something like 5%.

A beautiful old structure. any ideas on what this would this be?

Rachael’s right. It does look like we’ve been here before. I wonder if we took a break for a few days, rode the train and made up posts with recycled images we could get away from it? We may need to experiment with this.

Well, this is definitely new - or at least new to us, though it looks like it’s been around awhile.

We arrive in Tournus at two and check in at our hotel; but our room won’t be ready until four. We can put our bikes in the garage and hang out in the lounge though, which is a good thing because I’m having a mile SVT episode when we arrive. It’s getting hot and humid, the same conditions that triggered episodes back in the Midwest last summer and landed me in an urgent care facility on the Mohican reservation. I’ll have to start paying more attention to my hydration and electrolytes.

The upside to this is that I feel relatively guiltless for letting Rachael go out to do the laundry while I cool down in the lounge. She’s been looking forward to this actually because she did the research and found a laundromat just a block or two from the hotel - an odd affair that looks like it’s open air, with machines just out in a parking lot. She’s back in ten minutes though, frustrated after lugging our dirty laundry around in this heat only to discover that the place doesn’t actually exist. She checks at the front desk and learns that there’s another one nearly as close by and she’s immediately off again, not to return for two hours.

After an hour the bar attendant arrives, asks if I’d like a cold drink (oui, un bier s’il vous plait) and then turns on the TV, the large screen immediately above my head that I hadn’t noticed before. I’m annoyed by this at first until I look up and see it’s the Giro d’Italia! I shift to a different table with a better view and for the next hour and a half intermix blogwork with glances up to see if the breakaway group is holding their gap. They’re in Abruzzo on the first mountain stage of the tour, with two significant climbs. The group stays out front through the first summit and descent, but then the peloton quickly grinds them down. I head back up to the room when they’re all together again and just starting the final climb to the Blockhaus. With eight miles to climb at an average grade of 8% and a max of 14, they’ll obviously be at it a good while yet. I’ll check back in later to see that of course it concludes with a sprint finish. Who doesn’t feel up for a rousing sprint after climbing 1,500 meters in 13 kilometers?

Watching the Giro in Abruzzo, in Burgundy.

Our first thoughts about Tournus are pretty lukewarm when we look at the map and find few interesting restaurants open on Sunday night. Have I booked us into another wierd, quiet town when we could have been in Cluny tonight with its wealth of choices, we both wonder? We have a table booked at our hotel, but now that we’re here and see its menu we quickly lose interest and cancel our reservation - too expensive, too froufrou.

We dig deeper though and find a brasserie on the waterfront that might be worth a look. We’re down there right at seven, score an outdoor table just across the street from the river, and enjoy an excellent meal - good enough that we book ourselves for tomorrow night also when we leave. Afterwards we take a meandering route back to our room past the abbey and associated historical structures and are astonished by how interesting they are. An unexpectedly great evening.

Our riverside restaurant tonight. A popular place, probably the best choice in town unless you want an expensive gourmet experience.

Some entertainment while we wait for our entrees to arrive.

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Ride stats today: 28 miles, 1,500’; for the tour: 1,784 miles, 92,000’

Today's ride: 28 miles (45 km)
Total: 1,812 miles (2,916 km)

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Keith KleinHi,
Visit the cathedral of St. Philibert in Tounus. One of the very few Romanesque buildings that’s more or less intact. 11 th century mosaic behind the altar.
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2 years ago

Scott AndersonTo Keith KleinThanks, Keith. We walked around the outside last night and we’re completely spellbound. We’ll have to see if we can get a look inside before we leave.
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2 years ago