CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Arc-et-Senans it runs 228 km to Arc-et-Senans; allow about 4 h 20 of riding. It goes by way of Fortifications of Vauban, From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai, Lac de Chalain and back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 41 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux wanted to build an ideal city, and he started with a salt factory. The Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans was built between 1775 and 1779 on the orders of Louis XV's administration, to boil brine into salt, and Ledoux designed it as a perfect half circle of buildings around the director's house, with the workers, the boiling halls and the management all arranged in a geometric order meant to express reason, hierarchy and efficiency. It never grew into the full circular city he imagined, but what was built is astonishing, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1982, later joined by the great saltworks at Salins-les-Bains.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is where the day begins. Next is Fortifications of Vauban.
Victor Hugo was born in Besançon in 1802, and so were the Lumière brothers, the pioneers of cinema, a generation later. The capital of Franche-Comté sits in a tight loop of the river Doubs, with the old town on the peninsula inside the loop and the citadel on a rock at the neck, closing the only side not protected by water. The citadel was built by Vauban, Louis XIV's great military engineer, after the French conquest of the region in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of the twelve groups of Fortifications of Vauban listed by UNESCO in 2008.
Read the complete Fortifications of Vauban write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fortifications of Vauban comes up about 35 km into the recorded legs. Next is From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai.
Salins-les-Bains lies at the bottom of a deep, narrow valley in the Jura, squeezed between two forested ridges, each crowned by a fort, and its wealth for most of history came from beneath its streets. Deep underground, salty water flows through layers of rock salt, and for over a thousand years the people of Salins pumped it up and boiled it in great pans to make salt, a precious commodity before refrigeration, used to preserve food and taxed heavily by the crown. The Grande Saline, the great saltworks, is now a museum, and you can walk through its underground galleries, where a huge hydraulic wheel and pump from the nineteenth century still turn, lifting brine from the depths.
Read the complete From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 77 km into the recorded legs you reach From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai. Next is Lac de Chalain.
Lac de Chalain is the largest natural lake in the French Jura, a long, green-blue lake set in a valley among forested limestone cliffs, and its shores were home to farming villages built on piles thousands of years ago. The remains of these villages, preserved in the lake bed, are part of the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, listed by UNESCO in 2011. In the 1900s, when the lake level was lowered for a hydroelectric project, a dugout canoe and the remains of houses were found, and excavations since then have revealed a remarkable picture of life in the Neolithic.
Read the complete Lac de Chalain write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lac de Chalain, about halfway. Next is back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai sits at 171 km, about halfway. Next is back through Fortifications of Vauban.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Fortifications of Vauban write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Fortifications of Vauban comes up about 193 km into the recorded legs. Next is Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans closes the day.
Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans → Fortifications of Vauban is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fortifications of Vauban → From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai → Lac de Chalain is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Lac de Chalain → back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai is 39 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through From the Great Saltworks of Salins-les-Bai → back through Fortifications of Vauban is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Fortifications of Vauban → Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.