Day 69: Dole to Besancon

April 27, 2025

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I discovered one reason why I may have had the hard time pedaling 95 km yesterday, and that is it was the day before my birthday, a day when I turned 77. It's not as "bad" as I had thought. For about half a year Dodie has been telling people that we are 77, something not technically accurate, but supportable on the basis of rounding a number like 76 3/4. Dodie had me convinced with this, such that I started to tell people that today I would be 78. But no, I am now clear that this is my 77th birthday! Despite this relatively young age (compared to the spurious 78!) there is a song by Pete Seeger that is beginning to really resonate. It's called Get Up and Go

The opening verses:

How do I know my youth is all spent?
My get up and go has got up and went
In spite of it all, I'm able to grin
When I think of the places my get up has been

Old age is golden, I think I've heard said
But sometimes I wonder as I crawl into bed
My ears in a drawer, my teeth in a cup
My eyes on the table until I wake up

As sleep dims my vision, I say to myself
Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf?
But nations are warring and business is vexed
So I'll stick around to see what happens next

When I was younger, my slippers were red
I could kick up my heels right over my head
When I was older my slippers were blue
But still I could dance the whole night thru

Now I am old, my slippers are black
I huff to the store and I puff my way back

But never you laugh, I don't mind at all

I'd rather be huffing than not puff at all

Youtube tells me that not a lot of people actually click on videos that I put in here. But take a minute and click on this one, it'll give you a chuckle.

Now back to our regularly scheduled story:

Dole is famous for being the town where Louis Pasteur was born, though he went to school, taught, and did his research elsewhere in the region, and in Paris.

The fame and importance of Pasteur here can be seen from this mural near the front desk of our hotel.

Dole has a large and relatively untouched old town. We went out into it with the twin objectives of looking around and of finding an open bakery on this Sunday morning. These objectives we kind of in conflict with each other. The fact of it being Sunday meant that nothing was happening in the streets, making it easier to get good photos, for which the date could easily be 1800. On the other hand, there was no way to find an open bakery, or an open anything, in these streets.

Here is a " trompe oeil" building with realistic painting on the blank walls.

We made our way toward Pasteur's house, taking photos as we went. As you will see from the successive shots, we seemed to be going deeper back in history, finally reaching at least 1822, the year Pasteur was born. Of course, houses in the photos could pre-date 1822, since they had to be there already in order for Pasteur to get born in one!

This scene could have been shot hundreds of years ago (except photography is only from 1822, as we learned in Chalon!

This bust of Pasteur is on the corner of his street.

As the story goes, Pasteur's father was a tanner, and so the birth house is on a street that used to house tanners, with this canal out back. Although conditions here would have been unsanitary, they had nothing to do, as we read it, with Pasteur's studies or later career.

At the birth house, they make a big deal about the tannery, and about what the house was like. But Pasteur's schooling and work was so varied that all the birth house stuff is just a tourist thing.

Photo of the back of Pasteur's house from the canal.

What the street looked like in Pasteur's time.

Reading up a bit on Pasteur, we were surprised to find that his career was not focused on "pasteurization" and milk. Rather he studied fermentation and reasons for spoilage of beer, and he studied anthrax and rabies. His own really big things were vaccines against these. He suggested heating wine to prevent spoilage, but opinion was mixed on how much this might change the flavour. The procedure was abandoned in 1930, in favour of things like adding sulphite. It was actually a German chemist that thought of applying Pasteur's heat method to milk, a technique that has stuck.

We put ourselves back on EV 6, and were perversely gratified to see that it agreed that Chalon is 97 km away. At least we didn't invent extra distance, beyond foolishly using EV6 to twiddle along a river. We also note that Nantes is 900 km away, rather impeding us from dropping in on our friend Michel on the spur of the moment!

The route involves canals and rivers all the way, making for some very pleasant scenery:

Here we go! A feature of this not evident from the photo was that birds were singing loudly at us all the way, and frogs too. We did get some photos, that we will put at the end of the post, but many birds just remained hidden. We asked Merlin about this and it mentioned the Common Nightingale, Common Chaffinch, Great Tit, Eurasian Blackcap, Common Chiffchaff, Eurasian Curlew, and Short-toed Treecreeper, to name a few. Not that we got any photos of these!

Beautiful green, with a typical French fisherman. (Actually more typical is an older man, with his wife keeping him company from a chair where she is reading a book.)

We stopped in to the town of Rochefort, still looking for an open bakery. We did find it, and also this church with the tile roof. We think this is typical of Jura region we are in now.

At Rochefort EV6 decided to take us up on a ridge for a while. Perhaps this was to look at the Jura mountains. That's what we think we see here in the distance.

At Rochefort we encountered a touring cyclist who asked if there was an open bakery in town. Since we were now experts, we could give him precise directions. Later, on the trail, the man caught up with us, and could confirm that he had indeed found the bakery. It was then lunchtime and we were passing some picnic tables, so we decided to sit and enjoy some of our acquisitions.

The man turned out to be Charly, from near Saumur, on the Loire. He had hopped on EV6 to go visit his sister, in Besancon. Charly is slightly older than us, but definitely a peer. And we found we shared attitudes towards cycling, towards Warmshowers, multilingualism, globalism, and particularly towards that U.S. administration. We hope we have made a new friend, and thereby a new contact near Saumur. We would love to see Charly meet Michel. They have so much in common, and could cycle happily up and down that wonderful Loire river.

A more serious moment in our conversation.

Shortly after saying bye to Charly, we met this German lady, on her way to Santiago de Compostella, as you see from the Coquille St. Jacques on her pack. She stopped because she say the Santiago sticker on Dodie's handlebar bag. Along EV6 today there are dozens and dozens of long distance and local cyclists, not to mention walkers. Each and every one greets the others with "Bonjour". In a world of conflict, the harmony here is extremely heartwarming.

Not so heartwarming was this situation, just before Saint Vit. The path was blocked, because of construction of a bridge, just visible on the right in the photo. But they seem to be on the ball, because look at the detour sign, which is aware that we are on EV6, headed for Besancon. But, the sign points only to the river. Do they expect us to swim past?

Unbelieving, we scouted the whole area, looking for the promised detour. But there was nothing.

I found and walked over a possible way down a slope and around the construction. To get this far, we ripped apart their first line of defence fencing.

To escape the scene, this fencing was not so tough. Other areas of fencing were bolted together, but I thought my 15 mm axle wrench might do it. In the end, just some leverage won out.

At the far end of the disaster zone, the warnings and barricades for those heading west.

This meaningless sign looks like it has been in place for a while.

I got this visitor on my sleeve. It looks like the kind of fly that fish would appreciate.

We came to a spot where a tunnel though the rock was shortcutting a loop in the Doubs. It's called the Percée de Thoraise. There is a little path over the arch and a small statue there. We recalled that is some year the former Grampies thought this was neat, and crawled all over the site. Now older and tireder, they just managed to lift their camera and remember the scene!

The Grampies had more strength to look into the situation below, where some guard goats were in a large flock of sheep.

Actually the goats had help from two dogs. I tried to attract the dogs over, to discuss sheep protecting, working with goats, and so forth, but they didn't consider us enough of a threat to give us the time of day.

We arrived at Besancon with just about the predicted 60 km. i.e. no stress today. Besancon is on practically an island in the river, and has a chateau on a high bluff. The photo shows some of the fortifications.

Once inside Besancon, we could see that like Dole, it had a lot of staid old buildings.

A fancy roof, but not quite the "Jura" shape.

A little closer inspection showed the grand buildings to be not so impressive or intimidating, because of failures of maintenance, or maybe some other type of missing magic.

The central Eglise St Pierre, was rather plain.

The church faced a square that was just a bus stop.

The interior, rather dark and plain. It did smell nicely of incense, however.

Our "Hotel du Nord" was on a very nice looking street. I also liked that it had a "Camara" store, and in the window of this was a Lumix TZ99, a successor to the Lumix 30x zoom cameras we have been using. About €550. Not that we are going to be suckered into buying another of these failure prone babies!

Dodie is saying she is tired now. It must be yesterday catching up, because today was easy. But this hotel is quiet and nice, so there is a nice long rest coming, until tomorrow's included breakfast.

There we not exactly any new birds for us along the river and canal, but there were some nice shots of "old" birds, like these:

One thing that has burned our socks is about the Common Merganser. We admit we have seen this back home, so it is part of our 2025 count. But in Europe the bird has a different appearance, and it is called the Common Merganser (Eurasian). eBird is listing our Merganser that we saw today as "Eurasian", but it will not credit us with a new bird. I sounds like bird naming politics, because often the eBird powers that be will split species by "eastern" and "western" for example, and seemingly on a whim. Anyway, we are grudgingly posting our male and female Mergansers, here:

And hey, eBird, how about this UFO?

Today's ride: 63 km (39 miles)
Total: 2,179 km (1,353 miles)

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Karen PoretHappy Birthday, Steve! “77 Sunset Strip” is your new theme song.. or not.
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1 month ago

Laura SeiditaHappy belated birthday, Steve! You give me hope that we might have a good number of years left to tour :-)
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1 month ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Laura SeiditaThank you. It takes a combination of good health, good genes and good luck. Oh, and a strong stubborn streak.
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1 month ago

Laura SeiditaThe good genes is the one big unknown quantity, and that is mostly luck! We take it a day at a time and hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Big Dave always says to let your appreciation exceed your expectations and you'll live a happy life 😊
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1 month ago