Q: When is a river not a river?

A: When it’s a tributary. Here is the story of our trip so far, from the rivers’ point of view. 

We started off in the north France coastal area and fairly quickly crossed into the Loire basin.  We picked up the Loire cycle path as far as Nevers, and then struck out across country (over the hills) into the Saone basin – a northern tributary of the Rhone – which we crossed from Beaune to Lons.  After Lons our two-day climb into Switzerland over a fairly significant set of hills (for us) was of sublime indifference to the rivers, as the Rhone watershed is huge, and the rain would simply end up in the Rhone and hence the Mediterranean via Lake Geneva rather than via the Saone.

The whole of the approach to the Grand St Bernard Pass still belongs to the Rhone (although its official source is off to the east somewhere else in Switzerland) but as we gasped over the pass we’d crossed into the Aosta Valley, following the Buthier all the way down to Aosta where it joins the Dora Baltea in a torrent of glacial waters through Ivrea and into the Po approximately where we took the Tourin’ Not Romin’ decision.

The Po basin is massive and takes in most of northern Italy (the bit that isn’t the “leg” on the map).  We ended up alongside the Po itself in Turin, and then as we climbed back through Oulx and Susa towards Montgenevre we were alongside the Dora Riperia, another Po tributary.  (The Po itself actually rises slightly further south, rather counter-intuitively but I concede that rivers don’t always have to take my personal prejudices into account.)

Our descent into Briancon picked up the Durance as far as Laragne, and our triumphal crossing of the Col de Perty in the jumble of hills that make up the Drome area simply meant that we came across other rivers that join the Rhone sooner rather than later.

After the extremely cross-windy crossing of the Rhone valley from Vaison to Pont St Martin we picked up the Ardeche which in two biggish days we tracked from where it joins the Rhone up to its source and the official sign that we were crossing from the Rhone to the Loire watershed.

We immediately picked up the Allier river almost at its source, and that took us down down down (ok really down up down up down) as we wound through the extinct volcanos that make up the centre of the Grand Central Massif – through Issoire, Clermont and Vichy. Eventually the Allier is significant enough to have its own departement (pub quiz question – how many French departements are named after rivers?) but in our determination to have different routes out and back we callously abandoned it before it joined the Loire near Nevers and with the help of the Cher struck out over rolling countryside to end up crossing the Loire at Blois.

Our final transition has been from La Loire to Le Loir, a distinction which matters a lot to the locals but very little to our friends the happy raindrops who know that they are going to the Atlantic and not to the smelly old Channel, which is the fate of those who fall on the ground to the north of Alencon.

I have taken a lot of pictures of rivers and I promise not to post them all here, because I do value you, my only and amazingly persistent reader.