2002 Letter from LYON, P 1: Although the bus schedule on Sunday is "not very interesting", as a previous campground owner had told us, there was a bus to Lyon at 9:25. So we hurried to leave in time to walk the 20 minutes we knew it would take us to get to the bus stop, which the owner had assured us was only a ten minute walk away.

It was a long – and expensive – ride into the city, but we were glad not to have to fight the traffic in the camper. Our inquiries of the bus driver -where do we get the return, how do we get to the Old City (en francaise, n’est-ce pas) - got us a few grunts and the word Metro. Easier said than done when all you have is a 50 Euro bill and everything is automated. But Ron eventually found a news agent who would change the 50 if he bought a newspaper – and off we went to Tourist Information via Lyon’s lovely new-looking subway system.

When we came up out of the subway, we were really pleased we’d come. The Vieux Ville ( the Old City) is beautiful – and there seemed to be a huge hill with beautiful buildings on it. It’s quite spectacular. The girl in the Tourist Office said there were two main tourist areas. One was the Old City. The other is the area far up that hill, which you reach by funicular. We opted for the funicular. So we walked toward the Bonaparte Bridge to find the funicular.

The trouble was that the bridge was the beginning of a huge market – and despite the fact that we wouldn’t be home until evening, we bought a lot of stuff. It didn’t start off too heavy. How much can one chicken (cooked), green beans, peas, tomatoes, two kinds of olive melange, new garlic, bread and a few flowers weigh? Not too much at 11 a.m., but at 2 p.m., the weight of it caused Ron to think we might have also bought a case of beer, and by 5 p.m. he said he didn’t think we should have bought a case of wine too!

But at 11a.m., Adelle was very happy to shoulder the bag. We started looking for lunch. There was a beautiful cathedral a few blocks over and we wondered over toward it, when we noticed a big crowd. Kind of oddly dressed bunch of young men. Long black robes, rope belts, long strings of beads with a cross and sandals. There were a few other people with them. (Send e-mail identifying the order of priest/monk/etc. they were, please.) The cathedral bell rang, and they moved away somewhere. We had lunch and were about to look for the funicular. So Adelle asked a waiter at an outdoor café in very primitive French (direction funicular, please), and we found we had missed it. We backtracked. The signs were the usual French understatement. Invisible unless you happen to know that they are there and you look for them.