Joanne's long walks: Road to Home 2023 Day 42: Gy

For the pilgrim, what purpose may the city serve? For the pilgrim, only streets make sense, not the houses – houses tempt one to rest and relax, to forget about the destination.

Zygmunt Bauman, From Pilgrim to Tourist (1996)

Day 43 will be my first day of resting and relaxation, spending an entire day in the city of Besançon! My original plan was to walk as far as the high-speed railway station, several kilometres before the city itself, and take the shuttle service into the city centre, then take it back the next morning and walk the remaining kilometres into the town. This was because I had found good, inexpensive accommodations in the centre of Besançon despite the shortage of rooms over the long weekend, so it made sense to book two nights. But I ended up walking the whole 35 kilometres into the city centre, and so Sunday will be my very first day off from walking!

Elaine, Frédéric and I set off from our accommodation by the 19th-century fountain in Gy to follow an old variant of the Via Francigena, marked here and there with an arrow and the letters VF spray-painted in yellow, combining forest paths with the D66 road. We regained the official route of the GR145 at Etuz, where we stopped for a snack in the shade of the old lavoir - mairie. These structures combine a wash-house on the ground floor level with a town hall upstairs, and they replaced the village church as the central gathering-place of the village when public life in France was secularised following the revolution. Along with the churchyard, they are often the only public spaces in the villages where we feel free to sit down and take a break.

In Etuz I said goodbye to Frédéric, as he hurried on to the next village, Cussey-sur-l'Ognon, in time to take the bus into Besançon, where his walk ends for the time being, to be resumed in September. He didn't want to miss that bus, as the next one wasn't until Tuesday! Elaine decided to go with him in order to arrive in Besançon while the shops were still open and look for a new pair of shoes - the soles on hers are wearing thin.

I continued walking with Mick, the man from Northumberland who is walking to Palestine, who had caught up to us while we were resting in the lavoir. We charged through Cussey-sur-l'Ognon and took a shortcut along the D1 - which I do not recommend - to cut out some of the twists and turns in the official Via Francigena route, which goes out of its away to take you onto small dirt roads rather than walk on the narrow shoulder of the road between the traffic and the long grass. Just before Auxons we ran into Yves, a French walker we had crossed paths with the evening before in Gy, where he joined the Via Francigena after walking the Via Ligeria from Nantes. Another break for more snacks - in my case, bread and chocolate - in front of the church in Auxons, and then we were off on the final stretch into Besançon, which never seemed to come; every time we thought we had climbed the last ridge, expecting to see Besançon appear in the valley below, another ridge appeared. Endless suburbs and a technology district remained to be passed before we finally reached the city centre!

Highlights of this part of the walk included meeting our host from two nights ago in Dampierre, who just happened to be driving by in his car; getting spat on by a donkey - which cried in dismay when we then walked away; and finding our path barred by two snakes intertwined, whether in love or in war I cannot say. We met a young man with a dog trudging up and down the hills with two large shoulder bags who asked us if this was the right way to go south. (Couldn't he just look at the sun??) We stopped to refill our water bottles and refresh ourselves at the fountain in a cemetery, the only reliable source of drinking water along the trail in France.

Besançon or bust!

I took this picture for Mick's Facebook page

Arriving in the bustling city centre of Besançon on a sunny Saturday afternoon on a long weekend was a bit of a shock! All those well-dressed people, all those shops and sidewalk cafés! We hurried along to the diocesan centre in the former seminary, built between 1670 and 1695, where Elaine and I had booked a room. We ended up sharing our room with Mick as we had both a double bed and a single bed in our room, and there were no more rooms available. After a shower and a brief rest the three of us went out for a huge dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant and an after-dinner drink at a bar. Exhausted by our long walk in the hot weather, we turned in early, only to be kept awake by trance music playing at some outdoor venue, presumably in association with the Pride parade that Elaine had seen in the city centre earlier in the afternoon.

It sounded like a fun party, but even if I had been able to summon the energy to get out of bed, I doubt my legs would have had much dancing in them, after walking 35 kilometres! 😄