Groundhog Day

So for the past couple of mornings it has been like the movie “Groundhog Day,” except here in Lyon it's not Groundhog Day again and again and again, but rather the strike. Each night after cleaning up the kitchen, Katie and I have made plans for where we'd like to go. Two nights ago we decided to check out Pérouges - a medieval town with buildings dating back to the 1100s where the 1961 version of “The Three Musketeers” was filmed - because it's only a half hour away from Lyon. It seemed easy enough to get there, until we were waiting for more than an hour for a bus that never came, asking drivers and other hopeful passengers which bus was which and where each was going. No one knew a thing, so it wasn't just us. Finally, we had enough so we decided to forget it and Katie took me to see some of the sights of Vieux Lyon. We visited a bunch of different cathedrals and churches, each of which was a welcome relief from the cold and gusting wind. I thought Lyon would be warmer than Normandy because it's in the south, but apparently not. Once we got down into the center of town, we stopped at a pâtisserie where Katie got a praline tart and I got an apricot pistachio tart. We had hoped to stop at one of the boats along the river to get something hot to drink, but all of them were closed (at 3.00 PM on a Monday). 

View of Vieux Lyon coming down from the top of the hill.

Finally we headed back to the apartment, where we did our best to recreate a favorite from home – fajitas. Either the French don't like spicy foods or they really just have no idea what Mexican food is supposed to taste like because our Old El Paso seasoning tasted more like barbecue sauce than anything else, and the medium salsa was weaker than the most watery mild.

Today we were supposed to go to Grenoble, only to wake up and find that all of the trains to Grenoble had been canceled. It was the same story for Beaune and Annecy, two other towns where we really wanted to go. However, the old adage of “everything happens for a reason,” proved itself to be true today; only after we realized we weren't going anywhere did Katie decide to clean her room, during which she found her paperwork reminding her that she has her doctor's appointment tomorrow. If she had missed that (which she would have because we were planning to go to Marseille) she would have been kicked out of the country.

Hopefully there's an end in sight, no matter how far away it seems at the moment. At least the French are consistent in their rule of “tous pour un, un pour tous.”