Day 67: Macon to Chalon

April 25, 2025

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The Concorde is a humble hotel, but they gave us a ground floor room, #20, that had lots of space. They called this their "family room" and warned that in vacation season it is much in demand. What we especially liked was that our bikes were in the corridor, just around the corner.

Here is "our street", the one with our hotel, in Macon. As you can see, it's one way against us this morning, but we are ignoring that.

A little closer to town is this more expansive place, with a garage. There is also Ibis and Brit Hotel near the station.

This interesting building is the former post office.

Having passed on the 15 euro not so special breakfast at the hotel, we were on the lookout for bakeries. Below is the first one we found. I took its picture because of its approach to "Banette". As I understand Banette, it is an association of bakers that collectively sources its flour from selected farms and mills, and then prepares primarily baguettes, I believe, according to a centralized recipe. However individual bakers are free to add their own touches, in how the recipes are interpreted and executed. Generally we have found "banette" to be pretty good. Normally you see a bakery just with a "banette" sign, which I assume means it is a member of banette and sells banette. But here we see Corinne and Jean-Michel establishing a separate identity from banette, while still hanging a banette sign. I guess I should have gone in and asked them what that means.

The mystery deepened for me, when we later stopped in at yet another bakery, also creating some distance from Banette:

Ultimately, we bought most of our stuff from Rose and Emmanuel, below, who are not part of Banette. The customers outside seem pretty happy...

One last thing, for now, about bakeries. Seeing a sheet like the one below in the window of most bakeries, we assumed that the price of bread is regulated in France. This brought to mind lessons we vaguely remembered from history class, about the terms of trade between the peasants in the country and the people in the city (price of flour) and also about revolutionary fervor concerning the price of bread. So we assumed that the cheap prices of bread were regulated ones, to keep the mobs from the streets. The truth is actually quite different. The price of bread was indeed regulated, until 1987. But the government lifted this, and the prices dropped. E. Leclerc and Lidl competed the price of a baguette to as low as 39 centimes. One euro now seems pretty standard for a regular baguette. I wish I could see anything like this from bakeries back home. I think I paid $9 for a baguette recently at Fol Epi in Victoria.

We continued into the heart of downtown Macon, reaching the quite pleasant pedestrian street.

The church had Jesus on the front, overseeing the usual quite confusing cast of characters.

Inside it was also quite normal, except for a puzzling orange and white banner. Orange is somehow an unusual colour in a church.

Arches and vaulted ceiling. We are very used to that by now.

Macon sits on the Saone River, and has an attractive quai area, with substantial and colourful buildings.

The quai is named for Alphonse de Lamartine, hailed as one of the greatest French poets of the nineteenth century, who was born in Macon. One of his poems is preserved on a panel near the water. Dodie rather liked it:

Just down the quai is the 11th century St Laurent bridge. Surprisingly it is still in use, carrying car traffic.

We see a lot of fossil fuel saving electric stuff around - like city busses and postal delivery trikes - but here was a revolutionary new idea: horse power! The clip clop got my attention, and here was a city vehicle pulled by a horse!

The young driver seems concerned by something on her cell phone, but the horse is serene.

The job was picking up the garbage from quai-side bins.

The bikeway, the Voie Bleu, ran right by the river.

We soon popped out onto a normal, paved path, that followed the river for a long way.

The path was perfect - idyllic actually.

Here to one side was a field of flax, just coming into its blue flowering. We once cycled some 80 km of the "Veloroute du Lin (flax)", in Normandy.

We were surprised to be encountering a lot of touring cyclists, for the first time on this trip. We saw perhaps 30 individuals and groups this day. There were always warm greetings, but people did not usually stop.

An exception was a pair of fellows from Toulouse, who stopped and doubled back. They were on just a two week trip, but as part of a multi year project of making a Tour of France. As usual we got questions about where we were from in Canada, and comments about the political situation with the US. We have not found a single person in France with anything good to say about US policies.

The two were tickled when I talked about Toulouse (a place we like a lot), mentioning places and features of their home town. As travelers, we often know things about a country that regular citizens may be fuzzy on.

Although we have passed about 60 km east of Charolles, we are definitely in the country of the Charollais white cattle.

We rolled into Tournus, and while we liked looking at the buildings where we were, along the water, we passed on visiting the bicycle museum, the abbey, or any other attractions. Despite the good path, we were not making as fast progress as we would have liked.

Interesting, but not insane houses near the river.

We like Charollais cattle, because they are distinctive and easy to identify, but maybe we can not say that they are extraordinarily friendly or intelligent. Laurie made a comment on their little eyes, wondering that they do not have big "cow eyes".

We were deliberately calm around these ones, blocking the path.

In Ouroux, we noticed for the first time a church steeple done up in multicoloured tile. We think this may be a Burgundy specialty, so we will be on the lookout for more.

At the top of this steeple was this chicken. It is rather handsome, I think.

We were passing now through land with an open feeling, with fairly widely spaced houses, and a lot of grass. At least, a lot of people were out mowing. Houses were small, but neat, with a suburbia feel.

Bike direction signage continued strong all the way into Chalon, though it did not use the bridge our track showed, to get into town, and so it cost us a bit of distance in getting to our hotel.

We briefly passed near the cathedral, but turned, to fight traffic to reach the Kyriad Hotel.

The scene outside our hotel. Although it looks chaotic, there is a bakery across the street, a Monoprix around the corner, and walking distance to downtown.

We had asked for secure bike storage, and for something like 5 euros they assigned a huge garage just for us. It was great, once we figured out all the doors and locks and codes. We never did see how to turn on lights - a bit of a problem since it was so big! It turned out our room is ground floor, opening to the parking lot, so we could have just locked the bikes at our window.

We both felt exhausted and chilled this evening. It was not all that cold today, but it was chilly and with some head wind. I guess it's the change from down south where we came from. We ate a lot of food, which we hope will now stoke our internal fires. Tomorrow we have the included breakfast, and this will help get us started, on what figures to be a bit of a long day, to Dole.

One thing about today's ride was that we started out despairing about finding birds in France. We have been stuck at 199 birds for 2025 for a while. We were thinking that France does not actually have the birds, in sufficient quantity for us to see anything. But along the river, lots were singing. We just weren't seeing much. At least that's how it felt. But back with the computer and the photos here in the evening, we see that we had snapped 10 species, anyway: The Greater Whitethroat, Black Kite, Carrion Crow, Eurasian Kestrel, Magpie, Mute Swan, Red Kite, White Stork, Western Yellow Wagtail, and White Wagtail. Among these, the Western Yellow Wagtail brought us to 200, and the Greater Whitethroat, 201!

Here are some of our favourite shots:

Today's ride: 71 km (44 miles)
Total: 2,021 km (1,255 miles)

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Bob KoreisThe outdoor humor writer Patrick McManus wrote that there are two types of cows; FMCs and SMCs.

Fast Mean Cows and Slow Mean Cows.
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5 days ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Bob KoreisFortunately, we used to have cattle on our small farm and they hold no terror for us (except large bulls and new mommas) so we were able to calmly walk on through.
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5 days ago