Eventually we bought some olives and fresh anchovies, cheese and bread and wine at the market in Annecy, loaded up the car and headed to Lyon.
Lyon is France's third largest city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the Rhône Alpes region of west-central France. Two rivers, the Rhône and Saône meet here, so there is a lot of walking and parks along the riverbanks.
We got to our Hôtel du Théâtre, with a balcony view across to the carved faces on the theater. After dropping our bags, we took our food from Annecy and headed down to the river for a picnic, looking for an open market to buy water. None of the markets were open, and the streets were almost empty on a hot Sunday morning, so we ended up finding a bottled water in a Starbucks of all places. The river parks are really well done, with built in loungers and lots of kid-friendly areas, and the views up the river are pretty.
Lyon was historically known as an important silk production area, and there are lots of little secret passageways between silk merchants, shops and homes. These traboules, behind doors that looked like ordinary house or shop entrances, were used extensively during World War Two as a way for the resistance fighters to attack, then escape, the German Gestapo raids.
These passages are why we came to see Lyon.
We found a couple of the doorways, some marked by plaques, and explored back into the maze of alleyways. Some dead-ended and we would have had to trespass up private stairways to continue, other went through and dropped us out a few streets up and over.
Eventually we found a great little sunny café for a glass of wine, then continued up above the old town area to the white cathedral on the hill, the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière's. What I remember most here was standing in the courtyard, looking out over the city. We could see our hotel down in the area between the two rivers. Suddenly the bells started ringing for mass, and the sound grew and grew; layer building upon layer of bells, deeper and deeper until you could feel the bass bells pounding your chest. We just sat down and stared up and around, letting the sound literally wash over and pound us.
The church bells in France are one of the great experiences of my life, and these were some of the best.
Later we hiked over a ways on the hillside to the Roman ruins: the Theatre of Fourvière and Ampitheatre of the Three Gauls, which they still use for the occasional outdoor concert.
After dinner we walked the city again at night, enjoying the spotlighted churches and monuments, reflections shimmering in the river.