We skipped breakfast at La Treille Muscate. Douze was a bit expensive. They charged us anyway. I expected the bill to be eye watering, didn’t dare look at it until evening, wrote to them and they refunded the amount a day later.
Our friend’s cousin Gerard met us at the hotel. He was very welcoming. We returned to his house nearby, met his daughter, and enjoyed about two hours of conversation in English and French, then it was time to hit the road.
Target for today was the village of Baumes les Messieurs, in the Jura, about 300km north, all motorway except the last 10km or so from Lons le Saunier. Camille managed to screw it up though, and around Lyon kept us on the A46 toward Paris, instead of the A42 toward Geneva then the A40 to Bourg en Bresse. To compensate, she took us off the motorway onto the D1083, 50km of secondary road toward Bourg en Bresse. What does she think motorways are for? As a result, we spent an unnecessary hour getting to the A46 in congested traffic around Lyon, caused by a crash.
I have tried Camille’s Fast, Short and Compromise settings now. Camille is useless in the country, but indispensible in towns and cities. We killed her (I found the stop navigation function in the second level menu) and worked our way east back onto the A42 south of Perouges. Looking at the Google map, we probably should have stayed on the A6. After Lons the village was quite hard to find, and we finally drove down into the canyon, where the village nestles, near dusk. At the abbey we needed to call the proprietor Ghislain in French to check in, an international call for our Irish phones.
That left the problem of where to get a meal. At this time of year the one restaurant in Baume is closed. Ghislain called a friend who ran a restaurant a few km away in the village of Domblans, where the canyon opened out. We drove there and found the restaurant.
We were the only customers. Ghislain later told us the restaurant had opened only a couple of months ago. It looked new. I don’t know why they had not closed down for the winter like the rest of France. Several staff there, just for us. Really good meal though, then back to the abbey.
I think it’s weird, bordering on bizarre, that a whole nation of people jostle each other for room in attractive places in July and August, then return to work in the month with best weather, leaving only the sound of crickets. It’s good for us international tourists though, and retirees. There are few enough tourists in many parts of France too. We saw our third red number plate 3 days ago, in 3500km of motoring.
I had forgotten to ask Ghislain for the wiffee code. The phone signal looked OK, but nothing worked.