Dumped Dung to White Gold, Arc-et-Senans

Zagan the motorhome’s tyres are sat within the imagined confines of an ideal city, a town envisaged in the 18th Century and signed off by the French King, but never built. We’re in the town’s motorhome aire behind the mayor’s office in Arc-et-Senans (N47.03375 E5.78097). Officially, it’s closed, but Ju’s unleashed her French vocab on the Tourist Info fella, and he’s given the thumbs-up for us to kip here – we just can’t use the service point – no problemo.

Arc-et-Senans. Service point blocked with squares of concrete to the left, then the fire station, us, and finally the cream building is the town’s Marie

It took us a while to find the aire, as the sign’s been black-bagged for winter.

The lashing rain, grey skies, familiar feel to France and lack of anything in particular happening has driven us to take extreme action. We’ve actually driven more than a couple of hours! After a cracking kip in Metz alongside a swollen Moselle, our French and Italian neighbours dragged us out of bed by leaving and shaming us into movement.

Annecy: we decided this cracking little lakeside town (previously visited in Dave) would be a good jumping off point for the upcoming Alpine Adventure. Out came the satnav, in went ‘Annecy’, out came a route which involved toll roads, more stabbing at the satnav and finally we had a non-toll route south. Hmmm, 8 hours of driving. Nah. We’re not that bored. Instead we picked somewhere about half way: Besançon, and found this free aire just to the south of it in the Camperstop book. Sorted.

And four hours later here we are. Motorway and dual carriageway made up most of the route, an easy drive with the added bonus of a couple of cow dung sightings: one piled on a speed camera (!), and the other alongside the road, in amidst a gaggle of burning tyres, presumably the local farmers letting their feelings be known about something they have bad feelings about. The smell was bad anyway, real bad. Oh, and we saw snow! As the road crawled up over the western edge of the Vosge Mountains, scattered snow sat on the fields and pastel-coloured houses. Even the rain had the good nature to turn to flakes for a mile or two!

So what’s this ideal city and white gold stuff all about? As we pulled into a car park here, thrown off scent by a black bag, an enormous columned building appeared in the windscreen. “What the hell’s that!?” Charlie wondered, for a second distracted from the fact his dinner was an hour late. In a tiny French village, the Saline Royale is somewhat out of place.

Entrance to the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans

The story goes something like this (from Wikipedia): salt used to be called ‘white gold’ due to its value as a food preservative among other things. A town up the road from here used to pump brine from underground natural salt reserves and boil the water to extract the salt. Once they’d burned all the local forest, importing wood became expensive but the town had no room to build evaporation buildings. So someone came up with the idea of pumping the brine to a custom-built factory (here), taking it a step further and adding a custom-built circular ‘ideal city’ into the mix. The King signed off on it, but only half the central factory part was ever built: the reasons for the project’s death seem to vary from the brine channel failing to the French revolution happening. Whatever the answer, we’re parked firmly in the ideal city, just a few meters from the walled central area. Have we been in? Nah, sorry, it’s €7.50 and neither of us fancy parting with our euro-gold/beer tokens to read about salt. Heathens we are, heathens.

Instead we’re holed up, heating on, beer in fridge, checking out the map for the route south. The current thinking is to get down to Annecy on Saturday, then head into the mountains on Sunday or Monday, to avoid the traffic generated by change-over day for the holiday-makers down there. Good plan? Dunno.

Good advice on a sign in the village: don’t touch the train’s electrical wires!

Cheers, Jay