Salade Lyonaisse

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The trip from Paris in the TGV was awesome. The Gare de Lyon station is magnificent in it's old world grandeur. The facilities are first rate and boarding facilites are so simple, god knows why anybody would fly anywhere that the TGV goes too... TGV stands for Train à Grande Vitésse and it surely is fast. We flew thru some of the prettiest countryside you will ever see and checked in to the Holiday Inn at Brotteaux by Lunch time.

Brotteaux is in a quiet part of town, and was really quite pleasant. The Métro lines in Lyon are newer and much cleaner than Paris... And we discovered , after a day, that some of the trains don't even have drivers!!! Mon Dieu!

We took it easy our first day in Lyon, having an easy lunch and a snooze, then we had dinner and came back to bed!!! Dinner was quite pleasant and the Monaco Tango beer that Sam had was red and sweet!!!

The second day we did the big tourist thing and went in to town. We took a cable car, which thankfully had a driver, took our time checking out the Basillica and the panoramic views of Lyon and it's surrounds.

We then went back down and wandered thru the many small streets and laneways of Vieux Lyon, which is just gorgeous, and then had crêpes in a nice little café. We also strolled around, checking the sights and looking for places to have dinner.

Dinner was at Chabert et Fils, in a small laneway not far from Place de Bellecour. The food of course was exceptional, and we have co,e to expect nothing less in France. Certainly the food in Lyon is better even than the food in Paris. I highly recommend their Foie Gras de Canard a la Maison and the Cuisse de Greouilles... Supérbe

Our last day in Lyon was spent at a leisurely pace. We slept in, had breakfast and then sauntered along to the Musée de Lumiére in Monplaisir. This is the home of the Lumiére brothers, who invented the Cinématograph, the forefather to the cinema as we know it today. They also invented a form of colour photography that remained popular until the rise of celluliod films.

We had lunch and then took the "Confluent" cruise on a boat called Elle. The cruise took us down the Saone river, to where it meets the Rhone, then up and back to where we started. The viez of the fortifications and the houses was quite spectacular... Not even the famous Mistral could put us off or blow us off course!!!

Thursday morning we got back on the TGV heading south to Provençe. Our first stop being Avignon. The city with the bridge!

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