Inter-Hotel Restaurant De L'Horloge Besançon

... count! In Besancon, we visited the Musee du Temps (museum of time) which houses many time pieces through the centuries. We saw the "world's most complicated watch" . Additionally, we saw the Astronomical Clock that has 30,000 parts which run 70 dials giving 122 different indices. Amazing! Besancon is surrounded by a Citadelle /Fortress, which ...

Finally got to a chateau today, but not the sort I had anticipated. I had been expecting something more grand with lots of fine furnishings, gillt etc.. and while this chateau was grand it was a bit more medieval. It had been an important line of defense in the many wars that have featured in France's history. After the Revolution the revolutionaries ordered it and many chateaux to be destroyed because of what they represented, so this magnificent ...

So, we went up to the citadel and bought our tickets. We decided to get the audio tour so I wouldn't have to translate everything for Ed. And there wasn't much information posted, so this way we had some information about what we were seeing. What we hadn't expected was how much random stuff there was at the citadel. The citadel is basically a big fortress on the hilltop where the governors or whoever lived in the 1600s and where they could defend ...

An early start as the road noise at 6am was incredible; interspersed with regular trains and their sirens its one of noisiest sites I've been on. Are there any campsites away from railway lines? Feeling a bit miserable this morning turning over the persistant failures in various area's of my life to date. But got on the path. Which turned out to be alongside the previously mentioned busy road. Then the path ended and I was mixing it with ...

... hostel isn't really busy enough to be fun. It seems to be rather informal in terms of knowing who stays and rely's on room key codes to control access. The kitchen is a fridge, microwave and kettle but there is a TV and about eight really comfortable chairs (this is a lot by youth hostel standards). Tonight I'm the only one in the room although I've seen another couple emerge from a room at the end. This is last unofficial hostel in Germany so its back to the institutions.

Last night I wondered over to the paddlers fire and they invited me to share some wine. It turned out that the tent was quite hard to locate. But in the end it turned out good. They were just out for the weekend, sleeping under a tarp and cooking over a fire. Although they did have to shuffle cars. There is something magic about a campfire and I must do it at some point. In the tree's I slept reasonably apart from being too warm! If fact it was much ...

In the original plan I was leaving today but the weather forecast for tomorrow said lots of rain. So more Besancon was on the cards. Breakfast here finishes at 8am; it's almost a challenge. Log into VC say good morning and suddenly you have 20 minutes left... Since today has the better forecast a mission was needed. It was to locate a hypermmarket and buy sandals. I've got some locations from Google maps and one is nearby. As in up a hill. Actually spending some time doing hills today ...

... quite hard as my steering is rather light and I couldn't multi-task. Then he asked me to speak english and veered off shortly afterwards. Back on the towpath the weather clouded over about lunchtime and it got hard to get the clothes right. The wind picked up a bit as well. By this point i had abandoned the direct instructions and was just following the Eurovelo route. At times this was a bit frustrating; it follows every twist not just the general trend of the river ...

... pictorial. They were very beautiful. On to Colmar which is like a fairytale city with a toy train puffing through the cobbled streets taking the tourists around, and delightfully bright painted houses leaning over the canals and spilling a variety of flower baskets into the reflections on the water. Musicians played on various instruments to the patrons of the many open air restaurants and we could hear a mixture of many languages being spoken amongst the people in town.

... day and continued on. After admiring the plaza a bit more and taking some more photos I eventually came across this bridge that I walked over. On the other side of this bridge I came across a cathedral, which I went inside and looked around in. It was a nice, grand cathedral inside but it wasn't the best that I had seen in France up to this point. After visiting the cathedral, I realized that there wasn't much more on that street, so I ...