Hérisson, bis

I was mentally all set to spend the weekend at a friends' place in the snow-covered countryside, hiking and photographing and making fun of Maurice, when yesterday Jérôme stopped by to say, well, they've moved his neice's birthday party and we'll have to reschedule.

Alright.

But whatever shall I do with my weekend?

Was it not just a few days ago that I declared the village of Hérisson a must-go destination? Golden idea!

Hérisson is north of here; north of Vichy and not far from Montluçon, not so far north as Nevers on the Loire river.

Hérisson is north of here; north of Vichy and not far from Montluçon, not so far north as Nevers on the Loire river.

The national train company, the SNCF, has never heard of Hérisson. Not surprising. It's too small and inconvenient a place to have a railway station. Unfortunately, long-range bus services have no general database of destinations. You have to guess a good town to start from, find their bus station's website (if it has one), and try rather randomly to find a bus that goes where you want (not a problem if the bus ends in the village of interest, but if it's a stop along a route, you may have to look through all the routes and even then it might not be obvious). So this getting to Hérisson is not so easy.

After a good hour of messing around on the internet, I utterly fail to identify any public transportation at all serving my spiky village of interest and its ruined castle.
Ah, but it does appear to be just 10km from Cosne. The train to Paris whizzes through the Cosne station; you can read the sign if you swing your head just so at just the right time. There must be a local train that stops there. Back to the SNCF. They’ve got one Cosne: Cosne-sur-Loire. Ah, the one I need is Cosne-d’Allier.

Looking at websites for Hérisson itself rather than transportation that might go there, I might find a tourism site that has a ‘How to get there’ section. Yes, yes, here’s one now. You get there by car.
I get so tired of this car-centric world.

But wait, there’s a rail line not far away, passing through Nassigny, a hikable distance. A rail, but no stop. I could jump.

Arrr. Foiled at every turn.
Looks like I’ll have to join the car people. With spur-of-the-moment rentals at 100+ euros, Hérisson will wait for some other weekend.