Day 51 – Le Tour detour (Sunday 2nd June 2024)

The rain continued overnight and it was dull and gloomy in the morning so our plan to spend the day travelling around the region didn’t look. But rather than spend the whole day indoors we ventured out anyway, hoping the weather would improve. But it didn’t…. at anytime.

Today turned out to be a day driving on some of the well known Tour de France roads and a day driving on roads seldom seen by tourists thanks to seemingly never-ending road blocks and Deviaitions.

I’d noticed on a map last night that a place called “Source de la Moselle” was not too far from La Bresse so, for want of a place to go in this rainy day, I set GPS-girl for the town of Bussang just inside the Vosges region near where it meets the region of Haut-Rhin. Like a sign of things to come our path through La Bresse was blocked by barriers, so our first detour for the day was upon us. It looked like the Sunday market had setup in the main street. To be more accurate it looked like the Sunday market was packing up in the main street as the rain tumbled down. Any way with the help of local temporary signs we made it past we were on our way.

 

 

 

In between La Bresse and Bussang is the town of La Thillot. A couple of kms out of town another road block halted our progress and sent GPS-girl into a spin. Following her advice we attempted to find a way thorough only to be confronted with more road blocks the deeper into town we got. GPS-girls the world over just can not handle road-blocks. When you ignore her advice she will almost every time try her darnedest to get you back to the intersection where you first ignored her. We found ourselves on some goat tracks on the hilly streets surrounding La Thillot before we made a breakthrough and popped up on the right side of the barrier at the other end of town. What a relief. There’s 20 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back!

Onwards we drove, finally arriving at Bussang 10kms further down the road. Just past the local Gendarme’s station we dived off to the left down Rue Lurenbacher which took us to a little nondescript park by the side of the road. Here bubbling from a spring at the base of a man-made stone monument were the waters of what will eventually become one of the great rivers of modern times. We were standing at the birthplace of the Moselle river. The waters trickle from the spring into a shallow well and then across the park in a tiny bächle no more than 100mm wide and 20mm deep before disappearing under a hedge at the edge of the park and on its way to join the Rhine some 544km later at Koblenz. It really is a most understated monument to a part of mother nature that makes such an important contribution to humankind. Incidentally, meeting the Moselle at its sources book-ends our trip to Koblenz in 2017 where we met it at its confluence with the Rhine.

The drizzle started to get heavier so we took a couple more pics and ran for the car. Safely inside we set GPS-girl for Mulhouse, a large city in the Haut-Rhin just 50kms from Basel and the Swiss border. Down the mountain we went eventually flattening out at the town of Thann. Absolutely nothing happening here. The place was dead-as. Thann does have a nice church, St Theobald's, so we popped in for a quick visit. In the church we received some divine intervention and scratched Mulhouse off the itinerary, replacing it with Belfort instead. Still a large town by any measure but at least it was in the direction of home…. sort of. Down the auroroute we sped actually using a Peage (toll road) for the first time. It was good to be able to cruise at speed for a while and have a break from the twisting, turning mountain roads.

 

 

GPS-girl took us to Place de la Republique in the heart of the town. Both Belfort and Mulhouse have featured as start points or end points of Tours de France over the years, most recently in last year’s 2023 edition where Belfort hosted the start of Stage 20, the penultimate stage of the race. I reckon Belfort would have been a good town to explore on a nicer day but the weather and other events prevailed and that didn’t happen.

We’d decided to take the most direct route home which, as it happened, would have followed last year’s Stage 20 Route all the back to La Bresse. Pretty exciting, I thought. GPS-girl led us further along Place de la Republique for 50m bound for the edge of town and the starting point of the Stage. Then we stopped! Since GPS-girl had been last advised the whole of the Place de la Republique had been re-designed and rebuilt. What was now a lovely new lawn surrounding the “Monument to the Three Sieges of Belfort” was less than 12 months ago a carpark. In the redesign the city council had seen fit to narrow the road substantially and install those posts that rise up from the ground and. Today they were up. A few cars before me were also relying upon out-dated GPS directions so were forced to U-turn on Place de la Republique to find an alternate way through. Being a courteous driver, I moved to the right a little and BANG! hit a post that was right next to the road. There is nothing more sickening to the stomach than the sound of metal on metal when you’re driving a car. The post was no more than 500mm high so was impossible to see from the driver’s seat. I got out to inspect the damage – a 300mm dent and scrape down the middle of the front passenger-side door and ding on the plate below the door. The post was unscathed. Not happy, Jan!!

So I took some photos and got the hell out of there. But GPS-girl has other ideas. For the next 30 minutes every attempt I made get on the road I wanted to by another route encountered more barricaded roads which eventually took me back to Place de la Republique. Now angry and frustrated and desperate I referred to Google Maps on my phone and set GPS-girl for a town (Lure, another TDF Stage starting point) which was in the complete opposite direction of where I wanted to go. That worked and I never saw Place de la Republique again! I wanted to avoid another “big” town so just before we reached Lure I set GPS-girl for La Bresse. The route turned out to be a combination of parts of Stage 20 of the 2020 TDF and parts of Stage 20 of the 2023 TDF. I just wish I could have enjoyed it more but I had other things on my mind by now.

We arrived back in La Thillot after climbing the famous Col des Croix (on four wheels and not two, thankfully) to be confronted once again by barricade and detours. By now I was immune to the distress they cause so I picked my way through the back streets of the town until we reached the road to La Bresse on the other side. In La Bresse the morning barricades were gone and we sailed up the main street and home.

I don’t have the ability to make calls with the SIM card I have in my phone but I felt an obligation to advise Sixt, even though there was no damage to anything else and the car was still driveable. What to do? In the space of 15 minutes once home, I installed Viber, created an account, bought a 100min/month call credit for France (AUD$2.89) and called the Emergency number located prominently on the car’s dashboard. That simple action bought some sort of relief. We’ll wait to see what transpires when we hand back the car in Strasbourg tomorrow afternoon.