Trip Report - L'Échappée Jurassienne (GR59): Day 7

Day 7 has arrived! This one's a bit different from the rest.

There are no stats for this day as it was kind of a rest day. I took the train from Chaux-des-Crotenay to Morez because I couldn't finish the entire GR59 due to time constraints so I had to take a little bit of a shortcut. The bigger waypoints on the GR59 I missed were Foncine (le-Bas and le-Haut) and Chapelle-des-Bois.

It's also shorter than usual- which is why you're getting an additional blog post of the Trip tomorrow and another one on future plans for the blog (coming soon!).

I spent the first few hours of the day getting to and checking out Morez. I wanted to get to the hotel (Logis Hôtel La Chaumière) early because I was super tired from the poor night before and the long hours of walking every day. I'd kind of hoped to arrive around 12:00 and ask if they could already let me in (didn't happen) so I only walked around Morez a bit before starting on my roughly 15km journey up the hill to Bellefontaine.

Morez had some cool buildings and a fountain of three lions:

Isn't this house super cool?

Detail of the lions (below):

There was also a bakery of "The Three Lions" that was unfortunately closed on that day (but open on Day 9! More on that in another post.)

 

And I found a fox:

 

Foxes are very popular in this part of the Jura. You'll see more of them on Day 8. (And I saw an actual fox on the night of 8-9!)

 

After leaving Morez with freshly acquired groceries (and an almost run-in with an angry dog... on a chain that still allowed it to get halfway across the street, barking, growling, snapping its teeth...) I went up a large asphalt roads with few cars before rejoining with the GR59 in the wrong direction about halfway up to Bellefontaine.

I'd met some people down below and since this post is short I'll add that I think the French are really super nice. A lot of people even in "bigger" towns such as this one greeted me and made small talk (as much as they could with my poor French). They like to ask where I'm going and usually seem happy that I'm there. (Except the dog mentioned above. But the dog's not really a person. So never mind.)

If you open Google maps you'll see it's not a very long hike to Bellefontaine from Morez- and I arrived fairly quickly. The hotel might have let in me... if there were actually any people there but the cleaners. The thing is (and I hadn't planned for that...) the hotel is a skiing lodge and the village surrounding it a skiing village. Which means that in summer there's almost no one there and the hotels definitely don't have staff at hand until "opening" time at 15:00.

That's ok though. I just sat down on the staircase next to it (for WiFi reasons) and reddited. And when a staff member wanted to pass (I suppose he had to do something on top of the staircase) I decided it'd be best to move to a big rock nearby.

I kid you not I sat on the staircase for one hour and the rock about two hours. And I had absolutely no desire to get up due to tiredness. All I wanted was to rest.

When the hotel finally opened I got my key very quickly. There weren't a lot of people (ski-hotel...) and my room was pleasantly spacious. Here's my dinner:

 

I'm afraid I didn't have the mental presence at this point to take pictures of the room. You'll just have to trust that it was very nice. (Note: It had a towel drying rack. I like those when hiking! Means I can wash my clothes and have them dry the next morning!)

That's all I have for Day 7! I hope to see you again tomorrow for Day 8. In the meantime you can follow me on Instagram: @jimneyhikes

- Jimney