We came to Lyon to board Uniworld’s S.S. Catherine for a second chance at a Rhône River cruise after taking a similar cruise on AmaWaterways in May 2023 – I’m hoping to avoid Covid this time around! Our ship was berthed an easy fifteen-minute walk from our hotel, so we went there after breakfast to drop off our luggage – you can see the ship in the photo below, just above my head (there were five cruise ships berthed in the stretch between the bridge we were about to cross and the next bridge about a kilometer downriver).

We’ve mostly been visiting museums we missed the first time around; today, we returned to the Fine Arts Museum with time for a more leisurely visit than we’d had in 2023. We went directly to the painting floors and saw pretty much everything that was on display (the 20th and 21st Century gallery was closed).

For reasons best known to themselves, the Museum was going to have live instrumentalists play original compositions inspired by some of the paintings during the afternoon; they were rehearsing while we were looking at the paintings, which was interesting, but we were hungry, so we didn’t stick around for the official performances. We passed one of the more interesting restaurants we’d eaten in in 2023 on our way back to the ship.

Our route took us across the Guillotière Bridge; we’d seen a painting by Sicard showing the entrance to the bridge in rainy weather in 1879; it was only cloudy this afternoon, but I did my best to reproduce the painting. See if you can tell which is which without looking at the captions.

We got to the ship a few minutes before the dining room closed and had a very pleasant lunch with an Australian couple, then sat in the lounge with a British couple until we were able to get into our room. Then we chatted with a couple from Brazil (who used to work at Stanford) and had dinner with yet another couple from Australia. So far, we haven’t really met any other Americans – I’m sure that will change soon.

We spent most of today in two museums, beginning at the Center for the History of the Resistance and Deportation.

The museum was originally established about 20 years after the end of WWII to capture the memories of Resistance fighters and keep them alive; later, after the trial of Klaus Barbie in the late 1980s, they broadened their remit to include the deportation, torture, and murder of Jews and others by the Nazis.

We spent several hours there and didn’t see everything – it was overwhelming. The signage was almost exclusively in French, but they had an excellent English audioguide which was very well-done, though I started using Google Translate on the signs so I could see more of the exhibits instead of listening to the audio.

After spending a while decompressing, we finally had enough energy to make the trip up to Fourviere Hill. We skipped the basilica of Notre-Dame; instead, we spent the afternoon in Lugdunum, the museum of Roman settlement in Lyon.