Lyon was a welcome chance to decompress after our hectic time in Bordeaux. It was also about halfway to Strasbourg where we will stay for a while. We had pretty much covered Lyon from top to bottom—literally—on our visit ten years ago, but there are still a few things we missed.
We had read that Lyon was heart of the French Resistance movement in World War II but that wasn’t of much interest to us then, nor now. We also knew that from the Renaissance until the 19th Century, Lyon was at the manufacturing center of silk cloth in Europe with as many as 14,000 looms. But we somehow missed the city’s “traboules,” those hidden shortcuts linking one street to another that silk merchants used to move their fabric while protecting it from the weather.
We walked about three miles to Vieux Lyon. Remembering our last visit, John took the red light as a sign to skip the steep climb to the Basilica of Notre Dame and we continued on across the Saone. We felt a bit like Harry Potter and Hermoine Granger in Diagon Alley looking for the wand-maker’s shop as we searched for the green door at 54 Rue Saint-Jean. Inside the Long Taboule stairways climbed upward to highly-coveted balconied apartments while the traboule continued on into the gloom, eventually ending in Rue de Boeuf. The headquarters of the Resistance was supposedly hidden in another traboule on Presqu’île right under the Nazi noses. We couldn't find it either.
The wind, at our backs on the downhill walk to town, was now blowing into our face and whipping white-caps on the river. So after a few photos of Lyon we jumped on the metro, and headed home.
Our other goal was the Musée Cinéma et Miniature that Chris had found so mesmerizing. We found it and it was open but . . . The things we most wanted to see—the tiny models of French villages, factories, castles and such—were being cleaned and restored and €20 each to see miniature movie sets seemed a bit steep. We tried, Chris. Honest.
