Happy 2017, everyone! I have a couple of posts I've been meaning to compose for a while, and this biking/running in Burgundy is one of them. I started posting about exercising in each of the spots we visited in France for many reasons: for people planning to visit who wanted to see some of the options, for any family/friends who were interested in more details about our vacation, and for my own documentation and reference. I'll probably skip posting about running in Paris because I don't think we found anything non-obvious (ie. we ran along the river). Beaune, however, was a different story. It was awesome exercising in Nice because I LOVE the ocean, but admittedly it wasn't that radically different than California. Beaune probably topped Nice in biking and running uniqueness.
Looks like wine country!
To understand why biking and running in Beaune is so much different than California even though we too have plenty of vineyards, there is a key point to understand about Burgundy. Instead of having discrete large plots of properties owned by single families or groups as we do in Napa or Sonoma, Burgundy is more "communal" where a family or group owns a few rows of vines in several of the micro-regions spread throughout Burgundy. This is important because it means that there is a lot more public access between/throughout vineyards. In fact, they basically invite you to travel through the vineyards.
Running
Around the town, it was fairly easy to find maps highlighting the options for different run distances.
Snapshot of a map we brought with on us our phones. The map was prominently displayed in a town park.
For one of our runs we decided to follow the green route through the vineyards and it actually reasonably well-marked (though we still did take a couple of wrong turns). The run was a combination of paved and trail, and it was moderately hilly.
If you ran through someone's vineyard like this in the US I'm pretty sure you'd be asked to leave. Or shot.
I should note that there is also a paved bike path and it's easy to run a simple out and back on that as well (more details below). But even though I'm not much of a trail runner I did enjoy the wine trail adventure.
Photo from the solo morning run I did a different day on the paved bike trail. Someone had drank too much wine the previous day to accompany me on the run, and I didn't trust myself to not get lost on the trails.
Biking
Biking in Beaune was SO AWESOME! The paved dedicated bike path through the vineyards in shown in the picture and easy to find from the town.
Veloroute la voie des vignes
The trail goes for miles and there are small towns every 2-3 km to stop for water, food, cafe, wine, etc. I don't think there's much need for a guided tour if you want to do this ride, the signage is very good. I'm not good enough with words to describe how cool this ride is, so I'll just inundate with you captioned photos.
Vineyards for miles
Sometimes the vineyards were surrounded by brick walls built thousands of years ago - the age of everything built here is SO much older than California
Headed into one of the towns
Wine cellar that we happened upon during our ride. It was a little creepy at first because nobody there spoke english and they were just leading us into a dark basement. Luckily when we got there it was filled with wine and not torture devices or anything else creepy. And nobody stole our bikes from outside while we were down there... another bonus.
In summary, if you're in France and you like wine, running, and biking, you can't go wrong with a stop in Beaune. I'm sure there are equally awesome wine/bike/run places in France, but we can highly recommend Burgundy based on our experience.
