Well, my commandeered verandah may have kept me dry, but it was a rather broken night’s sleep. I still couldn’t manage to get away before nine – but when I did, I changed course south to cut across the bulge in Switzerland encroaching into France. I was off-road and with the overnight rain things were decidedly muddy. Quite by accident, as I approached the Swiss border I happened across Kilometre Zero – the start of the Western Front in WWI. At that time, before Germany had lost Alsace at Versailles, the German-French frontier was here with the Swiss to the south. The ruins of the German defences were still visible. The Swiss Army had recently reconstructed the wooden fort that they used to keep an eye on the belligerents.

I turned to the road for a while before laying my eyes on a ridge above the valley to the south. This whole time it had been overcast with just enough drizzle to mean that the jacket had to stay on – but with the warmth, the rain trousers didn’t last long. I followed a double-track gravel road to the top of the ridge – it was pretty steep and took me through seven and then eight hundred metres. There was a tiny ski field at the top, but a missing sign sent me on a big loop downhill and then I had to recover quite a bit of altitude – a little frustrating to lose an hour, but hey ho.

There was a big plunge down to the River Doubs, it was rocky, slippery and all kinds of good fun to ride down. It’s times like these that make it nice to have a mountain-bike with big knobbly tyres on such a tour – I do spend quite a bit of time off-road now that it’s drier than the Ardennes. Trying to get a few miles in for the day, I followed the river down the valley to St Hippolyte – a rather nice little town that had a potable water supply outside the information centre (many fountains seen so far today were non-potable) and provided the day’s bakery stop.

Every village has a church and it’s usually the most obvious thing to take a photo of – this one before the first big climb of the day.

The valley from which I climbed.

And into the Doubs valley.

St Hippolyte

The only way out of St Hippolyte, in the southerly direction I was headed, is a really big road climb – my biggest yet that took me up 400 metres on a rather busy road. After giving him a head start in town, I hauled in another cycle tourist – he for some reason had two rear panniers, a bag on the handlebars and a trailer usually used for towing children with who-knows-what in it. That some people manage to find so many things to take on tour continues to baffle me – he really was breathing heavily.

I read somewhere, it doesn’t seem believable, that this area was where the first pack horses were bred. This one certainly had a great deal of stockiness about it.

At the top of the hill it did seem that I was up on a plateau – maybe this is what Adrien was talking about. Through a mixture of roads, forestry roads and mountain-bike trails I continued south. Stopping in Le Russey for dinner I got chatting to a couple of mountain-bikers that were just heading out on their weekly club ride. I was tempted to join them, if I could find somewhere to store my rear bag, but truth be told I was too tired from the day’s climbing. For only the second time this trip I had hauled myself and my load (small compared to some, admittedly) through over two thousand metres of climbing. I didn’t last long after dinner before finding a camping spot – I hope my tent stays up as there’s been a strong southerly all afternoon (which was delightful), it’s just started to rain and the stony ground here was not at all receptive to tent pegs.

Oh, if anyone can tell me what these little towers are for I’d be most interested. I first noticed them back in the Ardennes, they were larger there. I thought first perhaps they were fire lookouts (always in forested areas), but they are much too short. The one on the left is tiny, the platform is barely a metre off the ground; the one on the right is more of a normal size for around here.