August 3, 2023
Cluny to Saint Jacques des Arrêts
It rained a bit in the night, but by the morning the wind was back to dry our twice rinsed kit. Tobias was feeling a bit crabby today, right from the morning. Hopefully he'll cheer up once this tooth makes its way through his gum. It just makes it a bit harder to do anything when he's feeling so grumpy, so we were late getting on the road, despite having a big day ahead of us.
Luckily we pre-ordered bread from the campground so we got at least 3km on one pain au chocolat, and then another 3 with the promise of a big tunnel. Our route today took us through Tunnel du Bois Clair, the longest cycling tunnel in Europe. After about 300m he was all done with the tunnel so at the end (1.6km) we stopped for some melon at the picnic tables.
We didn't make it too much further before we stopped for lunch at a park. I got a bit grumpy after lunch because we had to stop at a supermarket for dinner supplies, but it was one of those huge ones where you could hire a van or buy a washing machine and also get groceries. What should have been a 10 minute stop wasted half of his nap. And I didn't even find sunscreen.
At least I had plenty of grumpy energy for the climb that followed. It was about 8km and we needed to gain about 400m. So not too steep, but it dragged on. Before too long the Roche du Solutré came into view. We didn't stop to walk up it since Tobias was still asleep and we had a long way to go, but we did get to see it for a very very long time and from almost 360 degrees. He did wake up a bit past there so we stopped at a cafe for coffee and waffles. James was feeling hungry so ordered three but Tobias wasn't interested at all. Neither of us were complaining about an extra serving.
We were less than halfway up the big climb and had our cranky kid back awake which didn't bode well for the afternoon. About 3 minutes after setting off we heard the first "all done bike". At some point I said to James that I'd just climb ahead of him so at least we both didn't have to listen to the whining. It makes my blood boil but since I can't get away from it and getting angry doesn't help, all the energy seems to somehow transfer to my legs so I can fly up the hills while also singing stupid songs at the top of my lungs. We waited about 5 minutes for James at the top. I can't say much about the scenery though.
Unfortunately the road down was covered in loose slippy gravel so we couldn't make up much time there, and we still had about 150m to climb in the last 10km. It was beautiful though as we came out of the forest and were treated to views all the way down to the Saóne river. Tobias was still not happy so we invented a new game called "is this a poo" where he has to pick out if something is a poo or a leaf or a stick before we run it over. It was stupid, but it did have him giggling histerically rather than whining.
After the last climb we had a very steep descent down to Saint Jacques des Arrêts. There is a really small municipality camp ground here, basically just 6 sites above the village playground. The toilet is open but we had to wait for someone to come round and collect our money and show us the code for the lock box to the shower. One other group showed up as we left, a British family of 3 with bikes on the roof. They shared some wine with us and we had a really nice evening talking about our adventures.
Somehow we've avoided too much rain this evening but we won't be so lucky in the night and tomorrow. Its still extremely windy and blowing a bunch of rain showers our way. We ended up doing over 800m of climbing today so we're pretty tired, we should have a shorter day tomorrow.
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Today's ride: 37 km (23 miles)
Total: 2,601 km (1,615 miles)
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