Day 90 – to Mesnay

With senses dulled by a midnight Jamesons I gave Roja his breakfast, which he ignored, and lay reading Simenon and listening to the World Service in the pleasant morning temperature.

We both stirred though when horses began to pass. It was the route of the morning for the horse meeting that had taken place last night. Many riders looked in far worse condition than me.

It seems I’ve unknowingly become a friend of the Treffort horse community. All because of the woman’s phone I indirectly helped to find up at the Col on Friday. Many nodded and spoke a ‘bonjour’. The woman who lost and found her phone came over for a chat, and to introduce me to some friends. The carriage with the blue riders passed and Roja went for a sniff to their dog, who he had got on well with yesterday.

I had put together a very unambitious circuit, a couple of kilometres, 45 minutes maybe. But the dulling of the Jamesons has worked on the hip as well, and I was tempted to do a much longer route, up to the Crète that we didn’t do on Friday, and several Grottes (caves). Once up onto the ridge, which was slow as it was a humid morning, the views were excellent and the breeze very welcome.

The hip can have good days and bad. I’m doing much less distance and climbing than I did two years ago, and very little biking. I target a minimum of ten kilometres a day, and try to climb the height of Everest in a month. To explain the latter, I need to divert to Imperial measurements, an average of 1,000 foot a day defeats Everest at the memorable 29 thousand and 28 feet.

Roja was elated to be back at the van where he thinks he has his own private swimming pool in the old laundry..

In the end we were out for just more than 10 kilometres and just over 1,000 feet, about two and a half hours. Back at the van all was quiet, the horse meeting people had dispersed. After lunch I moved on, northwards around these gentle hills of the low Jura to Arbois, and its smaller neighbour Mesnay. It’s close to here that Roja has an appointment for a worming tablet tomorrow morning. It’s very humid here, rumbling with thunder and a few big drops of rain, but nothing heavier just yet. It’s one of those evenings when it’s a relief when it does start to pour, and the humidity drops a bit.

We took an evening wander down to the Cuisance river. There’s a waterfall here, and a footpath down to it that is usually well trodden, but a few weeks ago a storm came through with strong winds that took down many trees, and so the path is officially closed. I’m not one to be put off by a closed sign, and want to know the reason why. It usually doesn’t end well, last year for example in Slovenia when the reason was that the path was impassable because of a landslide, so it was reverse for three kilometres. But this was a good move, the usual at atmosphere at the waterfall enhanced by the damage the storm had done.