Let's follow this road and see where it takes us

Thursday September, 30
Dijon to Dole 70km

Quote of the day: "I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle it's not going to be satisfying."
Greg LeMond
 Another dreary day here in France. We haven't seen the sun in the morning for about a week now. Despite this, we woke up early (it was practically still dark out) in order to maximize our day, well really in order to maximize our time spent sitting at breakfast. We realized one of the tires on McKayla's bike had gone flat overnight so after repairs and whatnot, we didn't actually end up leaving the hostel until almost 11am. Amie set off to run some errands before her train, while McKayla and I (Erin) headed northeast out of Dijon towards Besancon (pronounced bess-an-sawn). However, we soon found out the road we wanted to take was impossible to reach without first travelling on a major turnpike. We made several attempts to find alternate routes, but every attempt resulted with us standing on an on-ramp to either A31 or A29 (not good) while cars wizzed by us, honking their horns. It was not a very pleasant experience, and I was feeling really anxious the entire time. About 2 hours and 12km later, we found ourselves riding on a bike path along the Bourgogne canal heading south-east. At this point, we were simply happy to be off of the heavily trafficked roads, and figured we'd just bike until we hit a town with a train station (which is not too difficult to do around here). Soon enough, we found a road that was also marked on our big France map and followed it towards St.-Jean-de-Losne. At this point it was raining and we were on a major road again; we were so glad we both have flourescent jackets!

In St.-Jean-de-Losne we stopped in at the Office de Tourisme to ask where the train station was and if we could get a train to Besancon (we had a hostel room already reserved for the night). The woman, Marie, who worked at the tourism office was a ray of sunshine on our stormy day. As McKayla put it when we were leaving, "she was the nicest person we've met so far." She first gave us directions to the train station and stated that it's very easy to get to Besancon, we just have to go to Dijon first! McKayla and I chuckled and then explained to Marie that we just spent 3 hours trying to get out of Dijon and we couldn't bring ourselves to take a train right back. We then decided to go with our alternative plan, and asked Marie if she knew of a good cycling route to Dole. Marie gave us a detailed regional map (much better than our large France map), printed off directions to Dole from Mappy.fr, called the Besancon hostel and switched our reservation to tomorrow night, then called the Dole hostel and made a reservation for tonight, looked up specific directions to the Dole hostel, called the Dole hostel again to find out the precise address, and finally wrote out these directions for us as well. We were so incredibly grateful, and our moods lifted immensely, despite the rain still falling outside. We quickly cruised the 20km to Dole, stopped in at the grocery store, and then found our hostel within 5 minutes! We would never have found it that quickly if Marie hadn't done all the research for us in St.-Jean-de-Losne. It felt so good to have a happy, successful ending to our not-so-hot morning.
To top our day off, after taking hot showers, we indulged in Fromage Blanc (basically greek yogurt, aka McKayla's most favorite thing in the whole world) with apple and pear sauce, pineapple chunks, honey puff cereal, and cinnamon. It was delicious and nutritious, don't knock it until you've tried it (Amie). We specifically left the pot and stove with Amie so we would have to eat food like this for dinner for the next few nights. After dinner we got really excited looking at maps for the next few days. We are pretty certain now that we will continue to Besancon tomorrow, from there we will be in the Jura region and will head through Ornans and stay at the youth hostel in Pontarlier, then head into Switzerland to Lausanne. We will need to buy some maps and do some research in Besancon tomorrow, in order to figure out how big the mountains are and what roads are best for biking.

Today we reached the 1000 kilometer mark for this trip!