Category Archives: jura

Tuesday 26th June 2018 – I DON’T KNOW …

… what happened today, but at about 16:30 this afternoon despite having been on the road for about 5 hours, I’d covered just 190 kilometres.

I’d started bright and early too, being up long before the alarm went off, thanks to whoever it was who decided to make a loud noise at 05:00.

When Jacqueline awoke, she baked some bread which was delicious and we had breakfast – home-made bread with home-made cherry jam. And chatted for a while too, but at 10:30 I hit the road. There’s a lot to do.

chateau de chasselas macon franceFirst stop was the Chateau de Chasselas, well-known to all Monty Python fans of course.

Last time that I was here I’d bought a dozen bottles of wine to give as gifts. There are still plenty left but as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I can’t get at them. So I need some more.

And it was quite a hike to get there too as they were resurfacing the driveway and we had to go the long way round.

But this was just one more unnecessary expense. This “relying on friends to return favours” is costing me an arm and a leg. Far cheaper to pay for everything professionally than to go through what I’m going through right now.

milamant café chasselas franceThat building there on the corner used to be the village café of Chasselas.

Jean-Marc’s grandmother was the owner of the place back in 1970 and this is where I stayed for part of the time that I was here back then.

Of course, it didn’t look like that then. It had much more charm back in those days.

I headed into Macon because I had noticed diesel at €1:39 a litre last night, and Caliburn could do with a drink. And from there I headed off through the centre of the town and across the Saone.

And I don’t recognise a thing about Macon these days. I’d be totally lost wandering around there today, it’s changed that much.

The road out was uneventful, but quite slow behind all of these grockles in their mobile homes. And also due to the multitude of roadworks and diversions that interrupted everything. Not to mention The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav who took me on the scenic route through Bourg-en-Bresse.

But at Lons-le-Saunier it all went horribly wrong. Too busy trying to beat a long line of lorries across a roundabout I must have missed my turning and ended up on a road that I’ve never travelled before.

It took me deep into the Jura Mountains and right over the top of a series of mountain passes, at one of which I stopped to make lunch.

lake geneva noyon switzerland june juin 2018We crossed into Switzerland at a frontier post that I never knew existed and round another mountain pass that presented me with this beautiful view of Lake Geneva and what I was expecting to be Lausanne.

And I would certainly have known if I had seen this view before because this really was so stunning. I joined another pile of grockles busily photographing the scene.

But it wasn’t Lausanne at all as I found out as I dropped down to the lake, but Noyon, home of UEFA.

And I couldn’t remember exactly where Noyon was, so I guessed, guessed wrong, and ended up going about half an hour in the wrong direction before I realised.

lake geneva lausanne switzerland june juin 2018So back into Noyon and back out the other side, in plenty of time to hit the 17:00 rush-hour queue at Lausanne, where I could leisurely take photos out of Caliburn’s window while we waited in traffic jams.

I’d been feeling quite ill for the last couple of hours and had been wishing that I could stop. But once I got beyond Lausanne I found my second wind.

Here I could put my foot down and I began to eat up the miles. And it was amazing just how quickly and how far we managed to move.

gasthof sternen koppigen switzerland june juin 2018But another major road-works and diversion meant that there was no time to reach my favourite motel opposite IKEA on the outskirts of Zurich so I pulled up at a guesthouse in a small town off the beaten track.

Switzerland is frightfully expensive so having negotiated a price of €60 cash (I didn’t have any Swiss money – that’s something else stuck back in Virlet) I wasn’t expecting much.

And it’s just as well, because I didn’t get it. This place would have been fine 50 years ago, but they might have changed the carpets and the electrical wiring.

For tea tonight I have a tin of potatoes, a tin of mixed veg, a tin of lentils, some gravy browning and a slow cooker. and furthermore I managed to make it plug in (I forgot about Swiss plugs, didn’t I?) And it was all very delicious too.

I ended the night with a shower, and now I’m having another early night.

It’s been another long day.

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Thursday 26th June 2014 – IN WHICH OUR HERO FINDS A BEACH

No idea where I was last night. It was a big town somewhere in the UK and it seems that Esther who formerly ran a motel near where I live had separated from her husband and she started making up to me. I was playing right along because of course my real interest lay elsewhere. Nevertheless we were becoming really close and Esther, doing the holiday rota for this shop where she worked (and which my brother had some kind of connection) put me down for the last two weeks in July – the same holiday period as hers – and that cocked up all of my plans to go to Canada as usual in September.

overnight parking place dole franceSo here I am, awake in my spec near Dole last night and, like most of my specs at the side of the main road, by the time that I wake up at 08:30 it’s totally deserted, despite the fact that when I came here last night it was heaving with lorries.

And as for this foam-rubber chair bed thing, I’ve slept on many worse things than this, that I’ll tell you. And while I’m sitting up here typing some notes, a roach coach pulls up. It’s just like in the UK.


so back on the road and as you might expect, about 5 minutes further on from where I parked, there’s a beautiful kind of lake with a parking area around it. That would have made a lovely place to have spent the night, if only I had pressed on a little.

Half a mile further on down the road I cross over into the département of the Jura, in the region of the Franche Comté. First village that I come to is called Chemin and this is well worth a stop, and for two reasons too.

hidden speed camera chemin jura franceI was going to say that there were two things to see here, but you will have to look hard to see them and I wonder how many people have missed them.

If you notice the grey pole just there underneath that tree, that is in fact the pole for a speed camera, would you believe, and the camera itself is well-hidden in the trees so that you can’t actually see it.


hidden speed camera warning sign chemin jura france“Never you mind” I hear you say. “There is bound to be a warning sign somewhere in the vicinity”. And there is too, but you would never have guessed it because that too is hidden in the trees as you can (or can’t) see.

Quite frankly, I reckon that this is totally dishonest. There’s no point in having them if they are going to hide them in the trees like this if you ask me.


I’ve also been eating a little humble pie too today. I stopped to do some shopping at the LeClerc at Belfort and found to my dismay that when I was going on several weeks ago about the cost of a gas bottle for my camping stove being over €50, I … errr … was clearly not quite on the ball. That’s the cost for the bottle too, and an exchange refill is just €18:00. D’ohhhh. Anyway now I have some camping gas and I can cook.

I’ve also bought a new toy. I mentioned to Rob a couple of days ago that I was looking for a portable air compressor. In the old days you could buy compressors where you could detatch the tank and take it down the fields with the air line and inflate the wheel of your tractor. I haven’t seen one for years, but here in the LeClerc at Belfort they had a portable air compressor with a 6-litre tank and it’s all portable – you can carry the lot off down the field if you need to. And it runs off just 270 watts too so I can even charge it up on the inverter in Caliburn.

bodensee meersburg germanyIt took me ages to drive through Freiburg in Germany – there were enormous queues all over the motorway and the city was covered in roadworks too. Still, I made it through the town and over the mountains. Now I’m sitting here at Meersburg on the shores of the Bodensee looking across to Switzerland.

Tomorrow I’ll make my way on to Munich.

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