Day 6—The sweet side of the hills

De Marmagne à Cluny
113 kms

The Vieux Jambon being a favourite dining spot for long-distance truckers, I had the pleasure of having the company of a few of them at dinner last night. It seems they are afflicted with 2 Great Injustices: the police and foreign competition. The former see truckers as “vaches à lait”, knowing that if they haven’t made their incident quotas for the week they can rely on any given trucker to be on the phone/eating at the wheel/three minutes over the time-limit between rest stops to stick him with a fine, which most of the time the company refuses to cover. The latter have swept in from the east since the last extension of the EU and stolen all their jobs, apparently whilst watching porn on portable DVD players and driving at the same time. This last revelation I take to heart, and vow to steer as clear as possible from the giants.

Dinner, in any case, was a triumph of French Golden Oldies—onion soup, boeuf braisé aux carottes, cheese plateau, raspberry bavaroise. Whole world away from camp-stove-cooked pasta with a sauce of chicken bouillon, always slightly redolent of gas, which has been the staple of my diet for the last week. After which I slept for about 12 hours, and woke up to slightly better weather.

After pushing off around 12, I climbed all the way up to Le Creusot, for the sole reason that it is the birthplace of Schneider Electric, the company at which I interned this summer. However, my leisurely tour was rudely interrupted by some mean looking security guys, who objected to me stationing my loaded bicycle anywhere near the Château de la Verrerie which was about to host the employment minister Xavier Darcos for some super-important meeting. Les vélos piégés, c’est la nouvelle forme de terrorisme du 21ème siècle, it seems.
I therefore came away with but One picture as proof of my passage, which goes out along with my Daily Shout-Out to Violaine, Cécile, Aurore, Pen, Hervé, Alban and the rest of my peeps at Schneider.

Le Creusot: seule preuve de mon passage. (Darcos, si tu m'entends, je suis fâchée contre toi).

Such stuff as dreams are made on.

From there, I cut cross-country to reach the lovely “voie verte” that runs along the old train tracks towards Cluny, pretty much letting gravity just pull me down out out of hilly Morvan and down into the plain of the Saône. Oh the clear blue afternoon sky, the riverside châteaux and the heavenly ease of it all. I reached Cluny in time to see the sun set over the old spires of the Medieval monastery, my leg muscles purring contentedly.

Château de la Jmenrappelleplus. All very pretty, though.