Sam and Dave’s blog

The first few days in the Jura tested our patience and sense of humour but the last three days were fantastic. The sun came out Thursday and continued to toast us (in a nice way) until Saturday. We binned the Lonely Planet suggested rides and went in hunt of a new freewheel instead. It was more fun being masters of our own destiny and choosing our own routes.

Thursday morning we set off from Nozeroy fairly early. But before we got cycling we made a cycle-changing discovery. My peddles were too far away from me…Uhoh! I had been peddling with all my force but only using my calf muscles…woops! No wonder Dave was absolutely exhausted after the previous rides.

With peddles now in the correct position we tackled our first hill out of Nozeroy… what a difference! All so much easier! Thank god! After the uphill, we freewheeled in the sunshine all the way to Champagnole. It was stunning through the forest and Champagnole is a relatively quiet town. The ‘Evasion’ cycle shop lived up to its name since the guy took apart our freewheel (to see if he had a replacement) but when he put it back in it started getting stuck again. At which point he very kindly said ‘je m’excuse!’ and left us to it…

So after Champagnole we headed 40kms over to Lons-le-Saunier in search of a bigger and better bike shop. We found one and the guy told us to stop looking. He’d lots of tandem experience and had done competitions on tandems before… I wonder if we’ll ever do competitions? Sounds like hard work!

We spent the night in Chilly-le-Vignoble in a very cute municipal campsite. The village was very pretty with a little brook and old stone houses. Dave also got acquainted with a man who had just patented a new type of dog food sauce! Apparently it’s great as you can give your dog any kind of cheap dog food but once you add the sauce they’ll love it. You heard it here first!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under Posts in English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.