My accommodation for the night was the appealingly named Zenitude Hotel. However it turned out to be a strange old place and is comfortable enough but has a sanitised feel to it.
Student accommodation with no architectural merit whatsoever. Getting here was difficult with its new looking industrial looking buildings arranged along half constructed parallel inclines with pharma sounding signs and the occasional tram. Eerily quiet.
It was a sunny Saturday morning, however, and I had a To Do list. First thing was the Post Office for, what I hoped, would be my 3rd and last time, it really was expensive sending all my additional stuff back home but it felt amazing. This time I have decided to send my cleated cycle shoes back and just use my one pair of lightweight trainers for everything. Also back were my elasticated waistband comfortable jersey shorts. My legs have been so ravaged by mosquitos that I only ever wear my long trousers in the evenings nowadays.
At least I have now become an expert at the clunky Bureau de Poste computerised system and even managed to help another befuddled customer with its bewilderingly clunky interface and non sensical instructions whilst wistfully remembering the good old days Before Brexit when none of this bureaucracy was required. It felt so good to whittle everything down to the basics and if I had invested in the super thin lightweight mattress and sleeping bag, I would be on a par with both Alan and Michal and their expertly, tightly packed panniers.
I then found a cycle shop and decided to replace my front tyre with a Schwalbe and be done with it. The owner reckoned I didn’t need to, but I could see signs of wear and for the sake of a few quid, don’t fancy being in the middle of some Bulgarian mountain range in a month or so wishing I had done so earlier in my trip whilst trying to replace a knackered tyre.
Chores done; I had fancied taking time to see the sights of Besançon as well as work out my route out of there tomorrow morning. The roads were weirdly complicated around my locale, in fact the whole area just felt a bit grim. I kept getting lost and at one time ended up on the beginning of a motorway which wasn’t great when having to reverse back.
It is another historic town, the French capital of watchmakers and rather randomly, a specialist producer of automatic ticketing machines for car parking, and airports. It has a ton of students and is a centre for all things micro technical. The centre is small and pleasant with the river Doubs meandering around it in a horseshoe shape and the mighty citadel at close to 400m high atop Mont Saint-Étienne. If I had been staying for longer it would be worth a visit, but it was mid afternoon by the time I had found the main historic part of the city and to be honest, I just fancied wombling around and doing the café terrace thing instead with my EV6 guidebook in hand, working out this next exciting part of my périple.
This whole first part of the trip has been very much a solitary experience, navigating my own route using google maps for pretty much everything. I didn’t see any other cycle tourists for the entire past couple of weeks and expected this would change as soon as I hit the EuroVelo route and I was pumped for that.
To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy Besançon. I think that this was largely coloured by the weird place I was staying, which was kind of techie but empty on the outskirts of the town itself. I had chosen it in a rush the day before when it looked like there would be torrential rain and indeed, I was sheltering from a downpour in a shop doorway at the time and tired after taking a completely unnecessary detour up a steep hill with major traffic, and by that I mean lorries thundering past. Often places are all about a state of mind and from the minute I arrived in between downpours along with trips to the soulless nearby supermarkets in a large shopping mall, I just wasn’t feeling it at all.
Given the network of busy main roads that I never seemed to fully break out of, I was glad that I had identified my route out of there tomorrow as I was planning on a long cycle to the border down of Mulhouse and didn’t want to get lost again in the complicated road system. I wasn’t too worried about taking main roads as it would be a Sunday morning.
So, back to the flat, another dinner of brown rice and tuna with a couple of tins of beer and bed.
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