Day Forty Three: Venarey-les-Laumes to Tonnerre: (Year 43: 2010)

November 2, 2017

Flash Back to 2010:

This year was the prequel to the Grampies that readers of these blogs have come to know. We were on one of our miscellaneous bike trips in the Rockies when we met a man on a long distance tour, using a BOB trailer, something we had never seen. When we asked him some of the Usual Questions, he directed us to Crazyguyonabike and so kick started us with bicycle touring.

On this early (unblogged) Grampies tour in the Rockies they met a long distance cyclist (Ushuaia to Alaska) who introduced them to crazyguyonabike.com.

Avi and Violet on a trip to the Winnipeg Folk Festival. This image is, to us, really evocative of the innocence of childhood.

Evelyn with Avi and Violet in Missoula, Montana. All would later move to Seattle, which is closer to US!

Sesame Street has provided theme music for us since Joni was born in 1970. Here is a favourite: The Ladybugs' Picnic

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Fast Forward to 2017, France:

A couple of days ago we arrived at a certain bakery in Dijon, hung a left, and boom, suddenly we were talking about the Canal de Bourgogne and have been since. And a day before that we rolled into Nuits St George and boom, suddenly we were talking only about Burgundy Grand Cru wine.

If those two bits of routing seemed a bit sudden and not well introduced, it's because they were kind of sudden for us too. We had certainly planned the route in advance, but we were working from things like bikemap.net or from a guidebook for the "Tour of Burgundy" that we had quickly picked up somewhere, and then downloaded the GPS track. Only now that we have almost finished this bit is it starting to sink in about where we are and what our route is.

This came clearly into focus this morning when at the B&B I noticed a book on touring the Canal de Bourgogne. It's 145 pages! It begins by describing 22 don't miss things to see and do, and then after covering the history of the canal, the architecture, cuisine, wines, economy, environment, geography, world heritage sites, etc. etc. it goes on to cover each of 24 towns from Dijon to Joigny.

And that is just the one book. We also picked up a map called "Cycling the Canal de Bourgogne". That one covers from St Jean de Losnes to Joigny - the full 242 km length.

From St Jean, of course, we had headed over to Nuits St George, which is cool, because as we have seen over there is the whole Burgundy wine region.

We went out and bought this, after spotting it at the B&B. Now I will have lots to read in the bath tub as I check out all the stuff we missed.

So what we saying? Only that these areas that we are casually blowing through probably deserve a much slower and more careful transit. For us that means coming back and doing it again. Hopefully that is not an idle sentiment - we are thinking about next year, when we could descend from Paris, and redo this bit before heading east to Vienna and north to Prague and suchlike.

Even at the same time as thinking, wow, this really is a destination kind of thing, we have to admit that it does involve a lot of canal side cycling. Certainly if we were going into towns a lot more it would break it up, but it is still monotonous, even if monotonously beautiful.

We have been mostly in the Cote d'Or (shown in blue) region in Burgundy. From Santenay to Beaune is called the Cote de Beaune and from Nuits St George to Dijon is the Cote de Nuits - wine regions. Then Dijon west to Migennes is the Canal we are on now.

So here we go with our first beautiful canal and path shot for today, followed by our first amazing medieval village for the day (Courcelles les Montbard).

The canal side scenery is not actually constant, though field and forest does usually describe it. Today we passed through a section of cliffs. The stone from these cliffs is well known. It is sliced up and marketed out of Ravieres.

Downtown Ravieres. We did not spot the "red square".

Ravieres was also the place where we decided to gamble on finding a restaurant even though the bike map showed only the mysterious red square. Ravieres did indeed have (one) restaurant, but it worked out well. Unlike the other day we were seated, given menus, had our orders taken, and so forth quite promptly.

I lied about the menus, though, because as is usual the offerings are on a chalk board. They looked like this:

The menu today. As usual, there is entrée, plat, and dessert. You can choose plat only or go for all three. We usually have little idea of what the words mean.

For speed and economy we only took the plat. From the choices, we went for the cocotte de poisson and the filet de lieu noir. We did this not knowing that "cocotte" is casserole and "lieu noir" is saith, a cod related fish species from the Netherlands. The casserole as it happened was also made with saithe, but the two dishes were very different. The fillet was in a fairly strong mustard sauce, very good, and the casserole was rally a Thai flavoured dish, what with the coconut milk - excellent.

The fillet - with mustard sauce. The balck-ish tones of the fish is characteristic of the species.

The apple crumble in the desserts looked really good, but we had far to go and convinced ourselves that we would find a bakery soon, which we did not.

We continued past a number of large factories, all of which turned out to be cement or lime or similar producers. We learned this from a canal side info panel - the factories universally do not identify themselves or their products with any type of signage. These factories are the remnants of what would have been a large amount of industrial activity while the canal was in its heyday, in the early 1800s.

Part of one of the large cement, lime, plaster? places.

Our day was very long, and seemed to involve a lot of pedalling in between points of interest. One of the points, though was Tanlay - a nice looking village and a small port with lovely boats.

Again Tonnerre, our destination for today, seemed to be rather coy - just not putting in an appearance as we seemed to pedal and pedal. When finally we came abreast of it on the canal, I was thinking "Well, should I be honest and photograph this?", because what we saw were really plain apartment buildings. But the "real" Tonnerre was actually .7km away, and once we had covered that we were rewarded with an interesting town of jumbled white buildings with red roofs and two large churches. Our hotel, Hotel du Centre, is funnily enough right in the middle of this. We rolled in, really tired, and were invited to just leave the bikes at reception. We have not really looked at the town, but by tomorrow should have more to say, and maybe even will record those ugly apartments by the canal, for completeness.

Meanwhile I did walk 100m up the street to the "Banette" and in that way, at 5 p.m., did finally find dessert for lunch!

Today's ride: 78 km (48 miles)
Total: 1,748 km (1,086 miles)

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