Traveling to Lyon

September 22, 2014 by lafrancoysse 3 Comments

The goal of Saturday (Sept 20) was to get myself from Avignon to Lyon via regular (non-TGV) train. The train did not leave until 12:30, so my morning task was to take myself off to the Musée du Petit Palais. The research-related “excuse” for including Avignon in this trip was that in the 1990s, the Musée du Petit Palais put on a exhibition about silk brocades. I have seen the exhibition catalog, called “Les Brocarts Célestes”, and it has some truly lovely photos of 15th & 16thC brocades in it. Unfortunately (as I said in my introduction to the trip), neither my attempts to take photos of the book images, nor attempts to find the book itself, were a resounding success. Hence, my desire to see if arriving at the source of the exhibit would yield a copy of the book. Alas, this turned out not to be the case. As the woman at the museum stated “Il n’existe plus” (it doesn’t exist anymore). So I will have to continue my quest to located a used copy. Because this quest was unsuccessful and the cathedral there was closed for restoration, I was done with my morning tasks sooner than expected. So I just took myself off to the train station to wait (got a good bit of knitting done).

The train ride to Lyon basically followed the Rhône River. The Rhône passes through Avignon on its way to the Mediterranean Ocean. Its course is basically a straight north/south line from Avignon, forming the Rhône Valley in the process. At Lyon, the Rhône bends 90 degrees to the east and the much smaller Sâone River comes in from the north. So Lyon is at the confluence of these two rivers. (In fact, my hotel here is located in the Presqu’île section of Lyon, which means “peninsula”, but which literally translates to “nearly an island”. Here is a photo of a 1575 map of Lyon’s presqu’île. You can see a big road cutting north/south across it…a little less than halfway down this road, on its righthand side are 3 blue-roofed buildings….that’s about where my hotel is.

Map of Lyon’s Presqu’Île around 1575

Anyway, on the trip up the Rhône Valley was quite beautiful. The train is running up the east side of the Rhône River. This is an area that I would like to see with a car at some future trip. It is fascinating to watch the landscape change as you head north. First there are weird rocky “mountains” to the east. I haven’t found the name of these yet. Just north of Valence, the terrain changes to bluffs on the east side of the river. These bluff are quite rocky and they hold lots and lots of grape vines. This could be one of the sources of Côte de Rhone wine, a wine I have been enjoying frequently during my meals in the south. As one continues north, the soil seems to become less rocky and the vegetation more agricultural (stuff other than grapes). South of Vienne, the low hills on the west side of the river become covered with vines. One can see barges pulled by tugboats, kinda like the semi truck as it pulls its trailer. These barges are moving freight up the river, much as it would have been done throughout time.

Once in Lyon, I managed to get myself and baggage off the train. Next task was to figure out the transit system enough to get to my hotel. Lyon has a complicated network of trams (above ground) and metro (underground) and, of course, no straight path to the hotel. But I got that figured out too. So by the time I got me and my bags to the hotel, it was time to just sit, cool off, and unwind. I did discover the wonderful Internet service and got some of the blogging backlog worked on.

I walked around the hotel area a bit, looking for a place to eat. In the process, I discovered the Café Tricot (the Knit Café), which was closed, but seemed to have tables, chairs (so presumably some sort of food or beverage) and lots of yarn. What a great idea! I stopped close by at a Tunisian restaurant for dinner and had a lovely meal of brik (basiically a quesadilla cooked in a skillet with hot oil; this one had goat cheese and minced mint leaves in it), followed by a tajine of chicken with lemon confit (which is a whole lemon that is cooked so that you can eat the whole thing – I gotta figure out how to do this!), and, for dessert, a “sablé aux amends et la cannelle”, which was a many-layered confection (bottom layer=thin white flour sablé cookie; next, a circular “cookie” of ground almonds – not as fine as flour but not paste either – and cinnamon, it tasted kinda like gingerbread), served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I ended the meal with, you guessed it, Moroccan/Tunisian mint tea.

I decided on an early bedtime to recover from the day! And now I only have two more days to blog until I am caught up…..