We slept fairly well last night, but were in no hurry to leave the hotel this morning. Once we finally got out the door, our plan was to make our first stop at the Lyon Tourist Office in Place Bellecore to pick up Lyon City Cards, but a lovely display of wisteria on the former Museum of Textiles distracted us (and many other people – it was hard to get a clear photo!).
We tore ourselves away from the wisteria and got our cards; as we left the Tourist Office to board the Metro, I took the legally required photo of Fourvière Hill with the Balsilica of Notre-Dame and the Tour Métallique.
The Musée Lumière was closed for renovation in 2023, but it’s open now and had excellent exhibits on the Lumière family (not just the brothers) and the evolution of motion pictures.
I’m glad we bought the audio tour (in English), because only a few exhibits had English labels. Here’s a small sampling of what we saw.
Two years ago, the museum was closed but we were able to enjoy their cafe; this time, we were told that we couldn’t eat in the cafe without a reservation! So we had waffles for lunch at Au jardin d’Anaïs, a couple of blocks away (no syrup, though – these were savory waffles), and then we hopped back onto the Metro for a return visit to the Lyon Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication.
Unlike our previous visit, we had time to see the temporary exhibition, which is currently “Jean-Luc Godard, le typographe à la caméra“; it would have been better if I’d seen more than one Godard movie (Alphaville) or if I could have read French. After that, we went directly to the final part of the permanent exhibition which dealt with the rise of advertising, graphic design, phototypesetting, and computerized typography during the last 100 years or so.
And then it was off to the bank of the Saône River to take the cruise included in our Lyon City Cards; this year, we took the southern route and saw parts of the river we’d missed in 2023, though the cruise took us as far north as Pont Koenig before turning around to take us to the Confluence of the Rhône and the Saône.
After the cruise, we returned to our hotel for a brief rest before heading to one of our favorite restaurants from our previous visit, L’echo des Galets, a few blocks north of Place Bellecore.
There’s underground parking at Place Bellecore – and you really can’t miss the entrance!
And on that note, bon soir from Lyon.