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). We got up and went to a nearby cafe for breakfast and then returned to our original unit to relocate to the new one.
We then spent a couple of hours working on various trip logistics—lodging in Zurich, lodging near Walensee for after Zurich and Lucy’s departure, and booking our return flights from Split back to the U.S. at the end of the trip (we’ll then fill in the middle with plans in Italy and Croatia).
We all headed out for a light lunch at a bagel place that Tim had failed to access on two consecutive mornings, and then we split up: Lucy and Benton to do a little shopping, and Tim to do a little wandering (visiting the Garden of Curiosity and then the remains of some Roman Baths that were tucked behind an apartment building).
After a couple of showers back at the apartment, we caught the metro to meet up with Simon for a private wine tasting. This started with meeting him at the metro station and walking to a handful of shops: one for some praline pastries (for future consumption; praline is related to what we have in the U.S…. but is entirely different and is a bright red filling that shows up in various types of pastries), one for meats, one for some bread, one for some cheese, and one for some veggie/fungi-based snacks. This, in and of itself, was an experience—seeing a local roam his neighborhood to buy local!
From there, we went to Simon’s apartment, where his wife, Pauline, and 2-month old, Alma, were. We spent a couple of hours there—having Simon give us an education about wine (and, comically, having to shift various boxes of wine out of the way to even access his large wine cooler) and wine tasting. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and had all sorts of personal anecdotes that were pretty entertaining—all mixed in with a 2-month old who has reflux, which means neither Simon nor Pauline are getting much sleep at all. AND…they are leaving on a 2-week vacation tomorrow. We hope we were sufficiently gracious and appreciative to make up for what had to be a tense discussion when Simon proposed the idea to Pauline!
At the end of the night, Simon sent us on our way with two bottles of wine. It’s not really feasible for us to carry them with us on the rest of the trip, so we’re hoping we can ship them back to Ohio and then maybe take them to Ocean Grove to enjoy with Julie, Paul, and Patty over Labor Day (because half the fun of wine is the stories that go with it).
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: Simon’s tale of buying wine at the wine fair on one of his first meetings of his future father-in-law and managing to stumble and smash the most expensive wine he purchased.
Tim: Lucy officially getting me hooked on both Quordle and Octordle (because…it turns out we were already both doing Wordle every day). And Typeracer at the end of the day: Round 1 - Lucy talked the whole time about how she was screwing up… and won (I came in second, Benton came in 3rd); Round 2 - Lucy complained less…and therefore destroyed us (Benton came in second; I came in third). The fact is… 70+ WPM is plenty respectable, but it can’t compete with 95+ WPM (Lucy).
