France

We got up at 7:00 this morning, grabbed breakfast at a bakery in Torla-Ordesa, and then hit the road for the 4-hour drive back to Barcelona, where we returned the rental car. We then grabbed lunch at the very Panera-like “Pan & Company” chain that we’d seen all over the place, and then caught our train from Barcelona to Nime. The train was delayed en route (by the wildfires, we think) such that we thought we were going to miss our 37-minute connecting train from Nime to Avignon....

We were all still a bit spent from yesterday’s travel, so we’d agreed that today would be a late-as-it-needed-to-be start and just some light exploring on foot. Benton and Tim headed to the grocery to pick up some light supplies and brought them back for a late breakfast, and then all three of us headed out to poke around the old city. It is a little odd to have accidentally landed ourselves in a town that is having a major festival (Festival d’Avignon), and that festival is occurring throughout the old city, which is the same area we are primarily exploring....

Our main outing today was a tour of the Palais des Popes (including the gardens). This palace was the home of the papacy for 67 years (9 consecutive popes: the “Avignon Papacy”) in the 14th century. Who knew? The tour was very cool: it was self-guided with small tablets and headsets, and many of the rooms had augmented reality on the tablets to show more how the room would have looked at different points in history....

The plan for the day was to get on the water in the morning while it was still (relatively) cool and then explore the Saint-André palace, gardens, and fort. The actuality was: a slow start with no city bikes available near our flat, so we walked to the free ferry that crosses the Rhône to Villanueva-les-Avignon, which was where the day’s activities were to occur. Then we walked down the towpath to the kayak/paddle board rental place… only to discover that it did not open until 2:00....

Today was a travel day from Avignon to Lyon. Our host, Francois, in Avignon drove us to the train station at 7:15 AM, which got us there wildly early (scheduled 8:10 train; actual departure at 8:30). In Lyon, we dropped our luggage off at a hotel to hold until we could check into our AirBnB, and then took a 45-minute walk to meet up with Tim’s analytics friend, Simon Néouze, for lunch and to get the lay of the land of Lyon....

Simon suggested we meet him for lunch and a mini walking tour today around the Opéra National de Lyon, Place des Terreaux, and the like. It’s the area where he lives, works, and has done both for much of the past 20 years. We walked around quite a bit, including cutting through multiple traboules, and got lots of little nuggets of history and culture of Lyon. For instance, Benton asked about the old-school video game-type characters that we had seen placed 10-15’ off the ground on the corners of some buildings, and Simon immediately knew that that was the work of urban artist Invader!...

‘Twas another day where we managed to leave the apartment at…noon (slow risers, laundry, indecision), but we did make the call that we’ll stick around in Lyon for a couple of extra days. First off, we headed by bike and by funicular to the Ancient Theatre of Fourvière—a pair of amphitheaters built by the Romans and still in use today (both had stages set up and were prepping for performances). Right next to the theaters was the Gallo-Roman Museum of Lyon-Fourvière—a museum that covered the Roman history of Lyon....

Today’s main activity was a kayaking trip—Benton and Lucy in a tandem kayak and Tim in a solo one—down the Saône, around the Confluence, and then briefly up the Rhône. It was a windy day, and a bit cooler than it has been, so pleasant temperature-wise, and very easy paddling downwind + with the current for the bulk of the trip…and a stiff headwind and against the current for the last 200 meters up the Rhône to the takeout!...

We’d decided several days ago to extend our stay in Lyon for a couple of days (partly the result of having a local—Simon—give us various ideas for activities, but also, we believe, because Lyon really is a fun city). But, we weren’t able to extend it at the same AirBnB we were in, so we booked a different AirBnB that was a 5-minute walk away (interestingly, the same one we had originally tried to book for the initial stay…but the hosts had had a family issue come up that made it unavailable)....

This was our last day in France, so we had breakfast in the flat and then took the metro north and walked (down a lonnnnnng hill) to Île Barbe—a small island in the middle of the Saône that had come up earlier in the trip, but we had never quite made it to. It was…disappointing. The kicker was that half of the (did I say small) island is private property and was not open....