Swiss Tunnels through the Jura to the Tour de France

Zagan the motorhome’s happily sat surrounded by woodland and meadow, in a free aire near the top of the Ballon d’Alsace (N47.81274, E6.84127). It’s a ski destination here in winter, but in July it’s mainly walkers, cyclists, motorbikers and mohoers. We’re back in France, and as usual, it feels like home. Well, not quite, since there are few English folks knocking about! That said, we bumped into a nice chap who reads the blog in Lidl earlier on, part of a trio of cyclists, two of which are in their 70s and fit as fiddles! Lovely people, and nice to speak our native tongue with fellow Brits again.

While we were in Switzerland we noticed that we could squeeze the living daylights from our €40 toll road vignette, by using it to take the A16 motorway under the Jura mountains to the west of the country. This would also have the happy consequence of bringing us to Belfort in France , quite a way north, just in time to watch a stage of the Tour de France, plus it lines us up nicely for the fast, non-toll roads home – the E23 to Epinal, Nancy and Metz, then the E25 into Luxembourg (the land of cheap fuel) and from there we can use the free Belgian motorways (a bit rumbling but still quick) and the non-toll French motorway network around Lille and the Pas de Calais. Boom. Home in a jiffy, although we’ve still another 10 days so who knows, we might take a less trodden path.

Two nights ago, we kicked off this plan(ish) by rolling (slowly) down the grapevine-blanketed hillsides of the Valais to the Rhone Valley below, where we picked up the motorway and ploughed our way to a Swiss Lidl. Huh? A Swiss Lidl? Why not just pile right out to France and cash in on the fact France, which felt a tad expensive for food when we arrived from the UK, now feels like a giveaway steal compared with Switzerland. Two things: cheese and alcohol-free beer. Yup. We got a taste for some of the strong Swiss cheese, and for some reason Swiss Lidls stock a very nice own-brand alcohol-free lager for 45p per 500ml can, which we’ve not seen anywhere else, so we grabbed a slab of the stuff.

Although we could have hammered our way out of Switzerland in just a few hours, we’d opted to spend the morning up at the Torrent-Neuf car park (such a beautiful place), and to break the journey with a stop at a lakeside parking area which got good reviews on park4night.com, and wasn’t far from the motorway near Morlon (N46.62679, E7.09331). The roads down to the lake were a tad narrow, deliberately made so to slow traffic down, and when we arrived the parking area was almost packed, but not quite. As the heat of the evening poured through the windscreen, we quickly pulled around the blinds, had a bite to eat and then made like the locals and went to sit on the grass, watching folks windsurf, kitesurf (wasn’t quite windy enough, which made the poor bloke work very hard to get going), sail small boats, swim and BBQ.

Swiss life looks, to me, rather fantastic. The cities regularly top world quality-of-life surveys and given what we’ve seen of Bern and the incredible landscapes available within a short drive, it’s easy to see why. The Swiss seemed a patient, confident, lithe, learned lot to me, and I was sad to say goodbye to their country. Yep, it’s wincingly expensive, but Swiss wages are high enough for locals to cope. For us outsiders living on a UK income, a motorhome and a willingness to do some free camping and cook for yourself makes it affordable for us to tour, and we’ll definitely be back, if the gods allow.

Yesterday morning we left the lake and took to the semi-underground motorway under the rolling, wooded Jura mountains. The Swiss are busy getting their motorway maintenance in during the summer, and we passed several sections of contra-flow, including inside the tunnels. The odd tunnel contrived to throw us off route too, with the right-hand lane peeling off just as we exited into the bright light. After a while everything slowed and halted at a good old-fashioned customs post. Switzerland’s in the Schengen Zone, so there’s no need to show passports, but they’re not in the EU, so they still have laws around what goods (and presumably people) can move in and out of the country. All the cars entering Switzerland stopped and waiting for the customs bloke (who looked like he wielded fearsome power) to nod them in. Oddly, everyone leaving stopped too. We’ve passed other Swiss borders with no-one stopping anyone, notably at the Grand St Bernard, perhaps because that route was a pain to ‘nip over’ and grab a load of groceries, or perhaps times have changed? Whatever, we sneaked in a Swiss fly, which must have freaked the poor thing out when he escaped through the door to discover his international adventure.

Into France, Ju had scouted out the route for Stage 7 of the 2019 Tour de France, which runs from Belfort to somewhere many, many miles away. In times past we’ve watched Le Tour in the mountains, waiting for days at the top of passes for the riders to grind their way past. This time we opted to follow the lead set by our mates Phil and Jules last year, who just piled onto the route for the following day and found somewhere to park by the road. We did the same, found a nice lay-by set back from the road just outside Hericourt, and within a few hours we joined by ten other motorhomes and caravans, mostly French but the odd Belgian, German and Czech thrown in (N47.57144, E6.74782). Motorhome parking rules seem to be almost completely relaxed during the Tour by the way and we wouldn’t normally have parked up in a lay-by for the night.

This morning I was awake for 6am, so got up and did some work (I know, I know, it’s unheard of!). The famous caravan wasn’t due for another few hours, and the riders another couple of hours after that, so once Ju was up and at ’em (helped by the various vehicles on the still-open road honking horns and setting off sirens as they passed) we grabbed some breakfast and then sat outside to watch the neighbours. They watched us. We all looked up and down the road. Traffic cops rode past looking stern and mean on an endless stream of motorbikes. Team cars honked their way along. Everyone got a cheer, but especially the bin men and the firemen. Merchandise vans arrived, booming music, with little balcony things attached to the back for dancing floggers of brollies to prance about on. Some folks get confused and think the stuff’s free (OK, maybe that was only us), others throw euro notes about in excitement.

Eventually a car arrived with a warning sign across the top: the caravane’s coming! Why the warning? I dunno, but I suspect it’s the sheer volume of tat they chuck out. :-) Ju loves this stuff, as does everyone (I secretly do too, maybe). Weird and wonderful designed trucks arrive, carrying sunglassed, costumed ‘stuff chuckers’ flinging armfuls of bits and bobs out at the roadside. To borrow a US phrase, people lose their shit over this. I played it cool, well, as cool as I’m able, and still scored an all-butter biscuit and a pack of miniature playing cards, both of which scored a direct hit on my personage, which in the unspoken rules of the game must have meant they were mine as no-one snatched ’em off me. Ju was a tiny bit dissappointed with her key-ring collection, giving half of it plus her other ‘winnings’ away to overjoyed nippers.

The last of these weird wagons rolls off up the road. Those lucky enough (having commited up to a week of their life to the task) to be at a mountain col, will most likely score the best stuff, as hats and shirts are dispensed in volume to get the sponsor’s name more prominently displayed on the telly. We all wait a wee while longer, fiddling with our stash of Haribo.

The first sign the riders are on their way is the helicopter. Or helicopters. We’ve been stages with six of them buzzing around the mountains, but we only saw a couple today, one very high up presumably grabbing the shots of the enormous local Peugeot factory they opted to cut to at the point we’d have been on the telly. With a few more lead vehicles come two riders, brave souls who’ve broken away right at the start of a 230 km (143 mile) race. They’re gone in a second, having passed a metre from us. A minute later the peloton arrives, a flash of colour and speed, even at the sedate pace they’d opted to ride at this morning. Someone shouts ‘maillot jaune!’ when they spot the yellow jersey (the current points leader). Apart from that, neither of us spotted anyone and the lads were off up the road followed by a forest of car-top bikes. And kaboom, there you go, 20 hours of waiting for 20 seconds of action. Was it worth it? Yeah, it’s a whirlwind.

Once the road had re-opened we headed to a French Lidl to stock up, finding it closed. Our French neighbours have a far more staff-life-oriented approach to opening hours than we Brits do these days, but they don’t usually shut their supermarkets all day on Friday. We guess the staff were given the day off to see Lidl-sponsored riders, so we drove off to Belfort instead. And then around the centre of Belfort, twice, before finding the city-centre Lidl, and then another couple of times trying to get to the aire past various road blocks from the Tour start in the town that morning. In the end a combination of heat, nerves (trying not to run people over in among the usual mass of bus lanes, traffic lights, give way signs, parked cars and pedestrians, including a blind lady tapping her stick towards the road and several blokes in sombreros) and the fact we’d seen much of the newer part of the city by this point slung shot us out of there to here. We’d been hoping to stay and watch the Bastille Day celebrations, but sod it, we were out of energy and headed up the hairpins to here for a rest.

Which reminds me to stop typing and get chilled out. I’ll head out later on for a last long hill run and to have a look around where we are, and it should be silent as the Sahara desert here tonight, perfect for a good kip. Phew, that was a long-old blog post, it’s been a full-on few days!

Cheers folks, Jay