This morning, we joined the ship’s “Silk Weavers’ Walk” to see a bit more of Vieux Lyon and learn a bit more about the silk industry here…and to walk off some of the food we’ve been enjoying.

We walked over to Place Bellecour where our guide explained its history – it had been the Archbishop of Lyon’s garden, but was abandoned for many years; eventually, Louis XIV turned it into a public square, complete with a bronze statue of the king, which, of course, was destroyed during the French Revolution. It remained a public square and eventually got a new statue of Louis XIV, which remains there to this day.

We walked the few blocks from Place Bellecour to Vieux Lyon; our guide explained that traboules were built as enclosed streets connecting densely-packed houses; there are a few open to the public, and we traversed one, the “Long Traboule”, which connects four houses.

We then stopped outside a branch of Brochier Soieries to learn about the lifecycle of the silkworm and its relationship to the mulberry bush.

We continued onward to one of the historic silk weavers in Vieux Lyon, Soierie Saint-Georges, where Virgil, one of the owners, gave us a quick tour and wove a few millimeters of brocade silk on his 200-year-old loom. It’s a family business; his father has been a weaver for 45 years, and has spent much of the time creating upholstery for places like Versailles. They also have a more contemporary side, with scarves and ties available at reasonable prices.

Brochier Soieries came onboard this afternoon to explain silk-screening and digital silk-printing…and just in case anyone was interested, they’d brought scarves for purchase. Diane was interested.

We’ll be leaving Lyon in a few minutes, en route to our first port of call, Macon.

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.