Elegant Lyon

Vancouver was delightful! Cool, rainy, cloudy, sunny weather, just right for fall, which may never come here in the desert. Wonderful Maya (5) and Sahana (5 mos) to play with. Getting to talk with Alisa any hour of the day, and seeing her life now. Talking with Vivek. Freshly picked blackberries. It was all good, nay GREAT!

But now I must get on with the trip to Lyon back in April. Mary and I are older now than we were in 1961, and perhaps not as resilient, at least not when we’re carrying 23 lbs of backpack each. Two weeks ago, I took my backpack to Vancouver to give it an outing, packing it with only the immediate necessities. Everything else was in a smallish suitcase stowed away in the baggage compartment and out of my care. I found it hard to believe that on the France trip I had actually put everything I needed in that one backpack. What freedom, wandering the Denver and Vancouver airports with a light pack, looking trendy and not like an overloaded old lady (see Mary at Heathrow).

A few minutes before our train was supposed to leave from Aix, it was not yet posted on the “departures” board, so I asked one of the train officials standing by the track, “Ou est le train a Lyon?” An easy question.

The answer was ridiculous! “Ceci n’est pas la gare pour le TGV!” (the fast train for which we had tickets). I pointed to our ticket, which said « Aix », and he nodded, but said that it wasn’t the right station, even though it was the station where we had arrived just the day before.

Pointing to the parking lot, and then to the bridge over the tracks, and then far off into the distance, the official showed us where to go. And hurry! We could still catch the BUS to the TRAIN if we ran. Another instance in which a train is a bus in France.

Those backpacks seemed heavier and heavier as we trotted up stairs, over the bridge, across four lanes of traffic, to the buses and then argued about which one to take. “Cinq,” I said. “Sept,” Mary insisted. Thank goodness I was right, because too often lately she’d been more right in interpreting gestures or even French for directions. Impulsive me would sometimes not listen long enough or pay close enough attention to the details.

In my notes, I mentioned that the man who sold us the tickets could have saved us a lot of stress by telling us the train left from a different station far outside of town. But the TGV was superb. It’s a Train Grand Vitesse and goes like the wind through the countryside, smooth as glass. It’s almost tragic that California never got that concept but instead opted for automobiles which now clog every road.

After arriving in Lyon, it was easy to find the metro. We sat on a double seat facing two burly men. I fit in nicely, my backpack angled into the corner to give me room, but when Mary sat on the aisle, she couldn’t angle her pack but had to sit straight forward. See the picture? Watching her face when she realized her situation was comic relief to an awkward problem. She pantomimed her “I’m sorry” and may have said it also, but the man was a gentleman and let her know he understood. Soon the other man, the one opposite me, stood to leave, so Mary’s man stood to let him pass. Realizing she could now move to the window seat opposite me, she tried to get up, but because of her precarious perch and the heavy pack, she couldn’t. Holding out her hand, she gestured for him to pull her up, which he did with a smile, amused.

Remember the situation in the elevator in Aix? Mary getting squished and pantomiming for help? She was getting good at it.

It turned out the man spoke quite good English, warning us about gangs who work in crowded places like subways to steal from innocents like us. Uh oh. Mary had studied up on this sort of thing before we left, and here was confirmation of all her fears! It sent her into a sinkhole of imagining what would/could happen, what the nefarious ruffians would look like, etc., and what if we were on the ground, having fallen or been pushed, on our backpacks, how could we get up, etc. etc.

Talking about it later, the imaginary scene of us in the subway lying like upended turtles on our backs screaming for help, legs and arms flailing as the gypsies or whoever run away in embarrassment, was so ludicrous that Mary saw the humor and lost a lot of her fear. In all our travels, we never ever ran into any problems from bad people.

The metro stop for the hotel came. We ascended the stairs to find ourselves in the wrong part of town! It was way too elegant for us, with wide streets and tall buildings with expensive stores on the bottom floors. Only a few blocks (and the Rhone river) away, I could see the Fourviere, the tall hill where the Roman ruins are. I was totally confused. It wasn’t possible that our hotel would be in such a ritzy area. It got more confusing when the building numbers went from number 43 to 52 with nothing in between. Our hotel was 47. I was almost positive that I’d been hooked by an Internet scam. The hotel probably never existed, except that numbers in Albi had also not been in sequence.

We had to find someone to tell us where we were, so we went into a small, elegant jewelry shop, backpacks and all. Nothing in the window was less than 1000 Euros. At first the blonde lady seemed dubious, as if she wanted us to turn around and leave quickly, but when she heard we wanted the “Grand Hotel de la Paix,” her manner changed.

I felt like telling her, “We’re not really ‘Grand Hotel’ people,” but that wouldn’t have been helpful. She walked with us to the street and pointed to the trees a block away, saying “Over the trees.”

Holy moly! The Grand Hotel de la Paix, three stars, fashionable part of town, easy access to everywhere, and affordable for most people, if slightly over our budget. Our room had a separate bath and dressing room, two beds, gloriously tall windows, wide screen tv (in French) table, soap, glasses, towels, and toilet paper! No more needing to steal TP like we did at Ile des Pecheurs! The staff was nice, pleasant, new-ish and eager to please.

Lyon was superb! You’ll see . . .