Oh-la-la Lyon

Well I think it's fair to say that we loved Paris, but we're in love with Lyon - what a city. If we were to live anywhere in France, Lyon would be the place. It's obviously much smaller than Paris but with a bit of the same look and feel. Most of the areas reminded me of the Latin Quarter in Paris, houses built on narrow cobblestone streets overlooking one or both of the city's rivers (the Saone and the Rhone). There's something like 30 bridges, lots of pedestrian bridges...the Goodwill Bridge has got nothing on these!


The weather was a bit windy and chilly but the sun was out which made it very bearable, so we decided to take a cruise down the two rivers. Turned out a lot of other people also wanted to take a cruise, which was fine with us until we looked around and realised we were the only two people under 50! Obviously it was seniors day out and we hadn't heard! Most of our photos are taken from the cruise.

Apparently Lyon has the largest shopping district in France, much to my delight and Matt's dismay! They have a massive pedestrian mall near where we stayed and then closer to the train station was a 5 floor shopping centre - oh how I loved that shopping centre. I hadn't been in once since we left so I was like a kid in a candy store. Heaven!

We also wanted to hire some bikes (well, let's be honest about this...Matt wanted to hire some bikes!) and take a ride along the river - bit like Southbank but much much longer - in the sunshine. But, unfortunately, the bike machine didn't accept our credit card. They have these bike racks all throughout the city that have bikes for hire - you get it at one rack and you can return it to any other rack in the city. Great concept because it only costs 60 cents to hire one for an hour and everybody seems to use them. I'm betting thats how these French women stay so trim after eating croissants and baguettes all day long!



We also decided to try and extend our stay in Lyon with the hopes of seeing the Wallabies play but unfortunately we couldn't get any reasonably priced accommodation at such a late stage...

So we really enjoyed our time in Lyon and hopefully we'll get to go back - we'd like to visit Annecy and Grenoble as well, unfortunately we just couldn't fit in this time round...