Visiting Lyon (France) with the Belle Famille by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Lyon (France) with the Belle Famille by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

On another weekend trip from Paris (France), Laurent and I took the T.G.V. (Train Grand Vitesse – Very Fast Train) to Lyon where the Rhône and Saône Rivers meet. 

The third river around Lyon is supposed to be the Beaujolais.  Watch out for this quiz joke if you eat in Lyon’s “bouchon” diners.  Bouchon refers to Lyon’s sausages and traffic jams.  Lyon is huge toll area for vacationers coming back from the Mediterranean here to reach Paris.  It is also the headquarters of Interpol to make sure the tolls reach Paris I think.

You are supposed to buy a huge bag of nougat de Montélimar for the family to eat while waiting to go through the toll as you listen to the “tubes d’été” –summer hit songs and talk about the TGV running on World War II tracks and having no room for souvenirs.  (The TGV has air conditioning, but it does not work well. Snark, snark, snark à l’américaine.)

I read Le Figaro newspaper looking through the want ads for work on the way to Lyon.  We arrived around 1 pm at the train station where Laurent’s cousin and uncle picked us up.

Laurent’s uncle went home to cook while his cousin showed us the principal sites in Lyon – the Colline de Fourvière, the Basilique de Nôtre Dame de Fourvière, the Roman ampitheatre, and the Odéon (indoor theatre).  We walked through the streets of Old Lyon, which reminded me of Italy.

Laurent’s cousin made the trip special by giving us a tour of Lyon’s secret passageways that led from courtyard to courtyard around entire city blocks.  We came out somewhere across town.  The tunnel passageways are called “trabouls.”

I remarked that these were better than the “cours de miracles” – criminals’ lairs - that Victor Hugo described in Nôtre Dame de Paris. 

“These could be mapped for tourists,” I added.

“The locals know where they are.  We never know when we might need to use them again,” he said in a sinister voice.  He was a theatre major in college, who wanted to do films, so we all walked around pretending to shoot people.

Laurent said, “You have to eat mint candy to be authentic after killing someone in France.”  I love insider French data.

When we went back to Laurent’s uncle and aunt’s house for lunch, we stopped and inspected the ruins at Champonost from the ancient Roman era.  There are archiducs, menhirs, and dolmens all over France.

Laurent’s uncle was recreating ancient Roman cuisine by roasting a leg of lamb that had been marinated in olive oil and herbes de Provence at an outdoor grill oven when we returned.

We drank a Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine with the lamb.  Châteauneuf-du-Pape is made a little further down the Rhône River around Avignon, where the papacy had its see when the Catholic Church had to leave Rome for several centuries. 

Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a blend of several varietals (grape varieties) with a papal insignia on the bottle.  It is one of my favorite wines, because it tastes good with lamb and has a very distinguished bottle decoration.

After eating we looked through French antique books and talked about the TGV being modern, but running on World War II tracks.  The uncle from “the Mines school” was the one to pooh-pooh to about possible derailments.  I do not think this is the rail situation anymore.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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