Hello! We’ve just had a quick visit back into France on our way through to Barcelona. This will just be a short one as our one day there was nice and quiet!
We arrived in Lyon after a day of trains out of Switzerland. We thought many times that we were going to miss our connections because we had about 4 trains with each of them only having about a 10 minute break in between. We had stacked our bags with food for the journey as we wouldn’t be able to stop for lunch anyway. It all ran pretty stress free and we made it to Lyon.
On our first night we decided to head out for dinner. There was a burger place not far from our hotel and it was delicious! The lady who owns it (and is also the chef) was so welcoming to us and stood around chatting. The waiter was also very friendly! We really enjoyed our meal there.
After dinner we went for a short walk along the river but we had sore legs from our 17km hike the day before! We headed back to the hotel and had an early night.
In the morning we went to a cafe that I found who roasts their own beans. The coffee was good so we bought some beans to take with us since we were running low!
We the headed over to the old town – Vieux Lyon. We walked around the narrow streets and then visited the Cathedral of St John the Baptist. This was a pretty stunning church and it was free to go inside!
We then took a cable car up the hill and visited the Notre Dame. This is a stunning church standing on the hill in Lyon. We also enjoyed walking around this one which was also free!
We spent a bit of time checking out the view at the top of the hill before walking towards the Odéon of Lyon. This is an ancient Roman amphitheatre which is still used today for various concerts and shows. It was pretty cool to be able to walk around. Once again, this was free!
We went from there and found a bakery for lunch. The ladies didn’t speak any English and had a good laugh trying to translate with us! Lots of hand gestures and sounds, and we eventually had the food we wanted!
After lunch we went back to our hotel and had a bit of a rest for the afternoon. We had done a lot of walking!
We then had a panic moment when I realised that we needed to book seat reservations for our train to Barcelona the next day. Somehow we had missed that in our planning. I tried to do it online, but it said it was too close to the time so we had to go to a train station. We headed to the tram which would take us to the train station and we arrived right on rush hour on a Friday night! We went to what we were pretty sure was the ticket office and the lady helping at the door spoke no English. I said “reservation?” and she ushered us through to the queue inside.
After waiting for a bit, we got called over to the counter and I said to the lady sheepishly “do you speak English?” And she said “no!” This was going to be tricky. I had typed out into Google translate what we were after so I handed her my phone and said “can you please help us?” She read through the French translation and looked at me and said “ah, oui!”
She did some typing on the computer, asked us for ID, and then turned the screen around to show us what she had done. She had successfully found us seat reservations for the train the next day! Thank goodness for Google translate!
Feeling a lot less stressed about tomorrow, we headed back into old town and had a drink. The waiter there wasn’t happy that we didn’t speak English and said “you come to our country and don’t even speak the language. If I go to Spain, I can’t speak French”. I think he had had a bad day. He continued serving us with perfect English which he was obviously fluent in. We didn’t tell him that we were heading to Spain and don’t speak Spanish! Two pretty contrasting situations.
After we had had a drink, we found a little place for dinner and then walked around a little more before having crepes and ice cream. It was starting to rain a little bit so we started the walk back to the hotel.
We enjoyed our short little visit to Lyon! It was nice to see another part of France and there is plenty more of France that we would like to see, but that will have to be for another trip!
In the morning we had a lot of free time which we spent drinking coffee from another cafe and sitting by the river before heading to our train!
Bye for now! 👋🏻
