• 903 m climbing

• 5h 58m elapsed

• 22℃, overcast

• 63.08 km

• 3h 57m moving

• 33% off-road

Today's route started in the opposite direction to the official walking route. Mostly to take in some old school canal engineering: the Savoyeux tunnel.

Dampierre sur Salon to Besançon GPX

Sundays in France

So today is Sunday in France, we might be in the pandemic lockdown, or we might not be: its not possible to tell since everything is closed anyway. Fortunately I found a single supermarket that wasn't closed so that was an easy choice for lunch, yes Cancoillotte cheese and a baguette.

Overnight: Besançon, Hotel Le Sauvage

Besançon was a great town, perhaps won't visit again but certainly worth stopping by, walking around town and spending some good time in the Citadel, taking in the views and learning about the military architecture of Vauban. There's also a zoo built into the Citadel which is kind of incongruous but I guess attracts visitors that aren't looking to spend their days looking at how bricks are arranged on top of each other.

Stayed at a relatively expensive hotel tonight. It was, however, eerily quiet during these pandemic times.

I didn't sleep (I think at all), not necessarily the fault of the hotel, but because I was so excited for the next day: climbing out of Besançon, then trekking through some gorges and finally climbing again to Pontarlier.

However the hotel did have one big issue: it wasn't possible to eat breakfast outside due to a plague of wasps... I'm not sure if they have that problem continually but I tried to eat out for a few minutes and there were 5-10 wasps continually flying around trying to eat my breakfast with me. So I probably wouldn't return to this hotel, certainly at this time of year.