Day 63:Montbeliard to Baume les Dames: A Doub-ious Day

September 22, 2015

The breakfast buffet being offered at the Bristol looked fairly good, but not for 20 euros. So it was yesterday's baguette and cream cheese in our room for us. We also naturally stumbled across one of the town's ten bakeries on our way out, and stopped to take on board some lunch sandwiches. "Ah, get me an eclair too, for now" I said. "For breakfast?", asked Dodie. "Yes, I'm weak from this cold", I replied. "If you are weak, I will get you something with protein", said the former nurse. "ECLAIR, NOW!", I croaked.

I received a coffee one!

Dodie in the bakery, with sandwiches and other goodies

Our next stop before leaving town was Super U, our favourite grocery. Dodie had hopes of finding oatmeal there. Each person has their comfort/power food,clearly. Last time we visited Nantes, Michel commented on how he could see we had come from the boonies, based on the store names on the grocery bags we had. Super U for example, must specialize in small towns. The other one we like is Intermarche, but we have yet to see one. We must not be in one of their regions.

Can't leave town without checking out Super U

Outside Super U, aside from typing this, I got my usual French lesson, answering UQs for a young woman who arrived by bike to do her shopping. She threw me, though, with her first question: "Are you doing a grand tour of Franche Compte?" Franche Compte meant nothing to me, so I assumed these were words I had heard wrongly. I asked her to repeat, and it came across the same. It was the woman who recognized the problem. "Franche Compte is where we are", she contributed. Ah, a light went on, and I was able to launch into my standard account of where we came from and where we are going. It highlighted once again, though, how by slow pedalling we continually enter entirely new places and environments. What happened to Alsace?

Our GPS program, Osmond, lists 26 regions like Franche-Compte in France. Worse, before it will search for a town, it wants you to know what the region is. Sheesh!

Dodie came out of the Super U triumphantly carrying a bag of oatmeal. It's "flocons d'avoine" here, of course, although the brand name was actually "Rapidoats".

All that remained was for us to return to the canal and keep pedalling west. Actually, we only followed the canal part time. The canal parallels the river, the Doubs, and sometimes our route was along the actual river. On several occasions, though, the route departed from both the canal and river and headed off into a town or over a "mountain" of some kind. This gave us some small opportunities to look at a town, and of course the "mountain" is a chance for some exercise. With only 1000 km left in this tour, we need all the exercise we can get. (Yeah, sure!).

Our typical path today, showing the canal left and the river right.

Now that we are on Eurovelo 6 we are encountering a few long distance cyclists. None so far has stopped to talk, but there was a couple that passed us yesterday - lightly loaded and booting along. We met them again today, puzzling over their small map. They too had stopped in Montbeliard, and the fact that we caught them is a tortoise and hare phenomenon that we often see. Sometimes we can share a route for several days with fast cyclists, because like the hare, they keep stopping. So in this case we got to chat with the couple for a minute, and found that they live in the UK, though the lady is French. They are doing a pure credit card tour, which accounts for the extremely light loads. They soon took off again, saying their destination was Besancon - 90 km distant at that point. A soaking rain started shortly thereafter and we wondered if they would downgrade their objective to Baume les Dames, which would put them back in sync with us.

We figured, though, that they probably had a reservation in Besancon, which would force them to push on. In this rain, it was not a situation we envied.

The jackrabbit cyclists from France and UK glance back before taking off.

We continued along the canal/river in scenes that seemed quite desolate in the rain. In such forlorn circumstances all you can do is just patiently plod on, and not think about how far you might be from any food or dry or warmth.

There are nice cows here too, though not Swiss Brown

Eventually, of course, we did arrive at the bridge over the Doubs, that leads to Baume les Dames. Unlike the deadly bridges over the Po, this one was of reasonable size and had a sidewalk. We know that will be the case for all the bridges we will cross on EV6.

Once over the bridge, one is not immediately in any sort of old town. Rather, there is a Super U to greet you. That's pretty good, actually. And a little further on there is a big LIDL! We had spotted a B and B on Booking, and reserved it. Dodie had noted that it was on the edge of town away from the river, but we knew the GPS would easily take us to the spot. After we passed the LIDL, though, it became obvious that something Dodie had suspected was also in play. Everything went up a mountainside from that point.

Now we began to review another kind of thought that we had been batting about. Clearly Booking has not signed up every accommodation in any given place, and there could be plenty that are cheaper or more convenient than the listed ones. The problem is how to conveniently find the rates and details for such places. We were thinking about this particularly now, as we passed not Booking listed places that were not up the mountain!

The whole situation got emphasized a bit when I declared that I now had a flat in my rear tire. This is the first flat of the tour. We knew we were near our destination in terms of distance, but not so near in altitude. Still, I pumped up the offending tire, and got it to roll for another 5 minutes of progress. Of course, with a tire that is soft, ranging to flat, pushing up a hill is more challenging. I was calling for more challenge earlier, right?

After three more pump ups we did make it to the B and B. The reward for the push up is a great view of the town. The house is a beautiful, though modern, place, immaculately clean. The owner, Christian, backed a car out of a garage to make a place for our bikes, and we immediately filled it with all our gear.

We were of course super curious to see how our "Increvable" (flat proof) tire had failed, particularly since we also put a urethane liner (the RhinoDillo) in there for double protection (and extreme weight). The first thing I saw was a round hole in the tread, out of which Dodie dug a chunk of what at first looked like a tooth, but maybe was a super hard piece of a corn kernal. It seems likely this had penetrated the Rhinodillo, so I pumped the tube to see if the air leak would be right at that point.

To my surprise, the Rhinodillo had protected the tube from the corn (or whatever), but just a few inches away was the actual source of the leak - the Rhinodillo itself had eaten through the tube, at the point where it overlaps itself! This is a well known problem with these liners, and the Rhinodillo has tapered edges to help avoid it. Not this time!

So I put a tire boot at the hole in the outer tire, and patched the abraded tube. All should be well. Our poor new host's clean garage had tools and upside down bikes scattered all over, but of course we put it all right.

After carrying our stuff up two flights of high narrow stairs (to improve the view) we settled into a lovely room with a great perspective on the town and the mountains beyond. We could even see where the other hotels are, down below.

One of the great features of the room is the presence of an ASUS large screen all in one computer, with Windows 8. (Well ok, maybe Windows 7 would have been better). It has been two months since I have used a real computer (with mouse), and boy does it make things easier! Maybe you will not see any quality improvement in the blog tonight as a result, but it will have been much easier and faster to produce.

You can see the outline of the Rhinodillo bite on the tube

The tire is fixed, but I don't seem too happy.

The view from our window. As usual, the photo does not show well how high up we are.

Tonight's blogging office, with real computer and large screen TV.

Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 2,926 km (1,817 miles)

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