A weekend of exploration

With the good weather continuing, we had a weekend of exploration in the sunshine. We live in an area known as Pays de Gex, which may just be one of the prettiest areas of France, the Alps aside. The Gex area includes the beautiful Jura mountains, which loom over us and the chain of other villages that are dotted along their foothills. In the winter, there’s some fairly decent skiing here and who can complain when it’s just 10 minutes from your door? (Well, me actually, as Baby Buckley is preventing me from skiing this year.) And in the summer, the mountains, their forests, lakes and plateaus are a haven for walkers and mountain bikers – those who don’t want to travel that extra 90 minutes to get to the Alps. I suddenly realise I'm starting to sound like a tourist brochure...

On Saturday, after a slow and lazy start, we took a trip up to Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, which is one of the bigger towns in the Gex area. It wasn’t as picturesque as we’d hoped so we carried on up the road to try and find a gorge marked on our map with a pretty little picture of tumbling waterfalls and rocks. No one appears to be concerned with signing things well in France, not even for what would be considered a fairly decent tourist attraction in the UK, so it wasn't terribly easy to find. We eventually located an almost deserted car park with a map of the gorge and wound our way down the rocky paths to the river.

Happy Jo.

The Valserine river (a tributary of the Rhone) has done some impressive carving away of the limestone here over the ages, leaving strange holes and inlets in the rock, as well as creating a series of deep river gorges and mini waterfalls. While Andy peered precariously over the edge and gave me small heart palpitations as he hopped between the mossy covered rocks, I sat back and watched the lizards scuttling around the rocks. 

Spot Andy, a little too close to the edge for my liking

In need of some lunch, we decided to follow a roadside sign advertising an auberge, although the once again excellent signing ensured there was no indication of how far away it would be. As we would our way up the mountainside, climbing gradually higher and higher, it became clear to us that the auberge doubled as a mountain-top cafe for skiers in the winter and that we would, in fact, be following the mountain road right to the top. I comforted myself with the knowledge that this would surely be a quaint and picturesque cafe with some of the best views in the area, and that they would be able to serve me a lovely fresh salad as Andy sipped on a beer and we gazed out over the mountains. My dream nearly came true: it did indeed have some jaw-dropping views out over the valley, but since it was 2.30pm they had already stopped serving lunch. When you are pregnant and you are hungry you have to have food NOW, so sadly we had to leave the beautiful views behind and set off back down the mountainside in search of actual nourishment.

On the way back home, we stopped off at a viewpoint Andy remembered from some years ago, which looks out over the Rhone and the impressive Fort L’Ecluse, which somehow manages to cling to the rocky mountainside.

The Rhone, cutting through the Jura at Fort L'Ecluse

Fort L'Ecluse, just about visible against the mountainside

On Sunday, we went further afield, in search of some mountain biking for Andy. A few years ago we did a paragliding course in Morzine, just on the edge of the Alps, and they also have some great mountain biking trails in the summer. With the lifts due to close this weekend, Andy wanted to make the most of the last opportunity to get out there, so while he hurtled downhill quite fast on his bike, I sat at the top of the cable car station enjoying the view, reading my book and tucking into the nice salad that I'd been denied the day before. Being pregnant is tough.

The view from the cable car at Les Gets, near Morzine