LT 2 July 11pm, Lyon
Sunday morning we got up early (for us!) and packed and tidied and cleaned up until it was time to head out. We’d had thunder and lightning and lots and lots of rain overnight, and it was still wet and miserable as we left. As we drove south towards Lyon we seemed to be driving back into the bad weather, and the rain fell steadily the whole way. Arriving in Lyon without the benefit of a GPS was a little bit interesting, but we finally found a place that looked like it could be town centre and, according to the signs, was somewhere near the Office du Tourisme. We followed signs to an underground carpark and headed up into daylight. When we arrived at ground level we were surprised to find ourselves in the middle of a rather large town square – entirely devoid of any kind of shelter for at least 100m (and 50,000 drops of rain) in every direction. So we splashed our way in a random direction looking for something to hide under. Here’s another funny thing about Lyon. The buildings are all old and tall, multi-storey, and all the building fronts are directly on the pavement, with no covers or entrance ways or covered pavements. So unless you have an umbrella (which we didn’t) or you hide in a shop doorway (which we did - for some considerable time, since it was, of course between 12 and 2 and lots of shops were closed), you basically just get wet. Peter’s phone managed to choke out the location of a nearby McDonalds, which would have wi-fi, so we braved the elements and ran through the puddles and rain towards the golden arches.
We tried searching out accommodation online but with little success so, after 2pm, we ran over to the Tourism office (back very near to the middle of the aforementioned very large and unsheltered square in town). They were able to help and we ended up booking a really nice tourist ‘residence’, basically a short-term apartment I guess. As in most of Europe, it is really difficult to find accommodation for 5 people in a single room or unit. Most hotels have a maximum capacity of 3 in a room, a few places will take 4, and barely anywhere will accommodate 5, unless you want to book 2 rooms, obviously doubling the cost. So we were pleased to have somewhere to go.
We spent the afternoon trying to find our way around town, then find somewhere to park close to the museum we wanted to visit. It was a combined cinema history and miniature museum (odd combination perhaps?) but interesting for a broad audience, and was a really good way to spend a wet afternoon. In the cinema section they had props and costumes from a range of actual films (e.g. one of the robots from I-Robot, a grappling hook used by Tom Cruise in one of the MI movies etc), plus pages from scripts, storyboards, recreated sets etc. Then the miniature displays had scenes, furniture and other items created by a few different artists – all very very detailed and very clever. The most amazing display for me was the decoupage, where some very talented people with far too much time on their hands, had cut out fantastically detailed scenes from a tiny piece of paper by hand. Seen through a microscope the level of detail was truly amazing.
4 July St-Gengoux
We woke on Monday to continuing rain. We had in mind to visit the Walibi theme park, about 60km out of Lyon, and had found their special deal where you could get tickets for 2 days for the price of 1. Walibi also has a water park section within the main theme park so we were keen to go there as well, if the weather improved. One of the things we had noticed during our unsuccessful swimming pool tour was that long Bermuda-style shorts/togs for boys were not allowed in the pool. While we waited for the weather to clear we went out into Lyon to try to find Caelan some shorter togs. After spending about an hour running from sheltered doorway to sheltered doorway looking for boys and mens clothes shops, Caelan remembered he had other sports shorts that were much shorter that he could probably use! Well it passed the wet morning anyway.
Around lunchtime we had a call from Peugeot letting us know that the garage that we had dropped the car off at had not been able to diagnose the problem and the car was being transferred to a bigger garage. They would call by the end of the day to let us know where things were at.
After lunch the rain slowed down to a very light drizzle and we decided to head out to the theme park anyway, in the hopes that the weather would continue to clear and we would get a reasonable afternoon. On the way out the rain got heavier and heavier and we thought we might have made the wrong decision. But once we arrived at the theme park it was back to a light drizzle. Knowing that we were returning to St-Gengoux the next evening we bought tickets at the gate, even though the lady told us a couple of the rides were closed because of the rain. There were maybe 100 people at the park, and as the afternoon went on the weather improved gradually, and all the rides except one or two reopened. It was quite a big theme park and it was quite eerie in a way for it to be so deserted. We could pretty much walk up to any ride and get straight on. If you wanted to you could stay on for another ride straight afterwards. Some of the rides were quite scary – there was a great big rollercoaster, and one of those tower things that shoots you way in the air so fast you can’t breathe. Towards the end of the day most of the other people had gone home and we had several rides where we were the only people on it – in fact Caelan had his own private rollercoaster at one stage. We bought candyfloss on a stick and went back to Lyon for the night.
Driving around Lyon is a real nightmare – it’s very difficult to get your bearings as the sun is in the wrong place, we don’t recognise the landmarks, there are two rivers and the streets are narrow, windy and often one-way. We tried to find a supermarket near our apartment using the GPS but we couldn’t find it, and then, finding ourselves in the area we had walked in the morning, no more than 5 minutes’ walk from the apartment, it then took us 20 minutes to drive there.
Tuesday morning was much clearer and brighter. After packing up our room in record time we took on the Lyon traffic again and headed back out to the theme park. There were more people there but it was still pretty quiet for its size. We decided to go straight into the water park part, since the entry before lunch was cheaper. We had been right to worry about Caelan’s togs – in fact, on presenting ourselves for pool entry, we discovered that Caelan, Peter and Katriel all had non-compliant swimwear, and Alyssa and I would both have to take off our swim shorts. In fact they even questioned the rash tops the girls were wearing. Girls can only wear togs (almost without exception they all wear bikinis), and boys have only ‘le budgie smuggler’ option – either in an undie style or the boy leg brief. They pointed us to the shop at the entrance so we could buy some. Well you should have seen our faces !!! There was a real mental battle going on between wanting to go in the pools and on the slides, and desperately not wanting to meet their swimwear requirements. Katriel had some other togs in the car that she could wear so Peter took her to get those while Caelan and I shopped. With much convincing, and the argument that everyone else was wearing them and wouldn’t pay him the least attention, we did eventually find something he could live with, and on Peter’s return we found him some as well. LOL sorry no pictures! Suffice to say once we leave France those togs will never see daylight again.
After we were finally ready for swimming and just getting sunblock on, another man who had managed to get through to the pools in shorts had been asked to leave and get compliant swimwear, something he had a major issue with. He spoke angrily, then started shouting, then they called security, then he really went off his nut. Seems he was not too keen on the idea. Later on we saw a group of 15 or 20 boys who had arrived and got ready and all were wearing board shorts and weren’t being allowed in. It was a strange rule – they had said it was a new national regulation (sorry only creepy togs here) but obviously we weren’t the only people who didn’t know about it. There was just something a bit weird about the security at the pool gate asking to see under people’s towels to see what they were wearing.
The swim park was quite cool, there were four big slides, and Katriel was allowed to go on two of them, plus several pools, and a children’s pool with other small slides. It was a strange sort of ‘fun’ though, so regimented and strictly controlled it was almost not fun. Besides the tog debacle, the slide queues were controlled by someone holding a timer – at the top there was a chain across, the attendant would let you through once there was enough delay after the last person. If you had your arms too bent or too straight she would call up the attendant at the bottom of the slide with her walkie-talkie, and then you would get a finger waggle from her. If you took too long to get out of the pool at the bottom you would get a finger waggle. If you stood on the grass, or on the rocks at the side of the pool you would get a finger waggle. The double tubes you went down the slides on (like a figure 8 shape) had right and left (named!) handles and an arrow on the front saying front but were otherwise symmetrical, but if you put it in back to front and hopped in you got told to get out and turn it around. Funny bunch these French.
Later in the day we left the pools and went back into the main theme park to check out the rides that had been closed yesterday and revisit our favourite rides. Again it wasn’t very busy, and any queues (if there even was one at all) were less than 5 minutes. Katriel enjoyed the little farm area with cute little goats, and she was also able to have a pony ride, one of a few attractions exclusively for little people, all very fair since she was excluded from a number of the big rides. The height restrictions were absolutely controlled to within millimetres – Katriel was well under the height limit so there was no question for her, but I did see a little boy who, with a bit of hair gel would have reached the green line, being turned away from the bumper cars.
We had a fun few days at the theme park, and it was good not to have felt like we’d sat around waiting for the car. Speaking of the car, by about 4pm, Peter decided to call Peugeot to see what was happening (since they’d promised to call by the end of Monday and it was now the end of Tuesday). They said they would call back, and didn’t. About 5.30 Peter called them again, and the woman said she would call back. Peter indicated that he didn’t have a lot of faith in that concept, but she promised. A few minutes later she called back to advise that the second garage that the car had been towed to from the first (yesterday lunchtime), had not yet begun their diagnostic!....!....! That wasn’t exactly the news we had been waiting for, seeing as we had been due in Normandy on Sunday and were paying the extra accommodation ourselves. Peter told them we were going to Normandy the next day and they could keep their car. Something along those lines :)
We headed back to St-Gengoux as we had planned, and stayed in a B&B owned by an English couple we had met at the Tourism office some days beforehand, and who had been a really helpful and friendly resource in the village. We didn’t arrive until almost 10pm, but strangely it was still light – very very long days here.
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