April 23, 2025
Strasbourg to Lyon
One More Train
Again, thanks for all the comments regarding how to continue to cycle tour as we get older. We had a lot of suggestions and nobody said to stop doing it! The Grahams are my heroes: still crazy after all these years and cycle touring at 88 and 86. By their standards, we are just getting started. The Grampies reported they limit distances to 50 km. When I start planning a trip I always aim for 50 km but somehow so many other factors come into play that the distances often wind up being longer. Perhaps we have to be somewhere to meet people or I can’t find tolerable accommodations. We have found longer distances are okay except when the weather is bad.
In any event, today in Strasbourg we had to face another day on the train but not until the afternoon. We used the extra time to enjoy our first charming French breakfast at the hotel. I reveled in the cute mini teapot and the Palais de Thé teas (and thought of you, Laura) and got to have my first self served soft- boiled egg. Well, actually Dave did my egg.
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I had time to work on the journal which I needed as we continue to be two days behind.
We walked through Petite France (the old town area of Strasbourg with cobbled streets and half-timbered houses) to the Historical Museum of the City of Strasbourg. It was a very worthwhile hour and a half, with a simple audio guide, low crowds and a well-curated presentation. We got a better sense of this city and the Alsatian territory, which has swung back and forth between Germanic and French rulers since the time of the Holy Roman Empire (Ninth Century).
Afterwards we walked back to our hotel and made our way to the train station. We had some extra time before our train arrived so I braved the line at the Strasbourg ticket office to make an inquiry regarding a thorny train travel issue we had in our future. After we leave our friends in Provence, we are headed to Northern Spain to ride some of the Camino. To avoid climbing the Pyrenees, which we did last spring in the rain and don’t feel the need to repeat, I had planned for us to take the train from Avignon to the town of Orthez on the Spanish/French border. I had a really hard time finding trains that would take bikes in that direction. The French rail system is set up for everything to funnel through Paris, and hardly any trains run across the south. I eventually found that a two day train journey was necessary, taking two different local TER trains from Avignon to Toulouse (including a change in Narbonne) and then on the following day, taking a long distance train from Toulouse to Orthez. While usually bike storage on TER trains is first come-first-served, on a very selective basis some TER trains now require reservations on holiday and summer weekends. The problem is, you can’t figure out (or at least I couldn’t figure out) whether your actual train journey requires a reservation, AND, if so, how to make a reservation if it does. The website only says the TER trains MAY require a reservation. Because of that, I resorted to standing in a ticket line at a French station in order to get contact with a kind human and hopefully get an answer. The Strasbourg ticket line was long didn’t move at all the first 7 or 8 minutes. I noticed another booth labeled TER with a lady with no customers and decided I had nothing to lose by seeing if she would talk to me because at the rate my line was moving, I would never get to the front before we had to depart. The agent was very nice, spoke enough English, and didn’t have a clue about the answer, but thereupon she engaged with another ticket agent in French, in that back and forth fashion that can so puzzle English speakers. Ultimately she laboriously wrote out the specific TER website on a sticky note and said I would need to make a reservation on that site.
While the problem wasn’t solved I felt like I had made progress and hoofed it back to Dave who was waiting by the bikes. The last time we were in the Strasbourg station we had taken a lift to the assigned platform but we couldn’t find the lift this time so Dave rode up the escalators, one bike at a time. It worked pretty well but I would have been afraid to do it. The TGV train in this instance is actually two trains that leave from the same track going to the same place. Dave figured out that the two trains start in different places, meet in Strasbourg and get hooked together for the ride down south. The process of boarding is relatively pain-free because there are only two bikes on each train and hence no jockeying for space. It was crowded though and every seat was full. And, in our 4 hours of free time Dave helped me get into the TER website provided by the Strasbourg ticket agent and (we think) we successfully made reservations for our bikes from Avignon to Toulouse!
According to Komoot is was only a 10 minute ride from the Lyon train Station (Part Dieu) to our little hotel. Unfortunately it was raining pretty hard when we pulled in, and our hotel was located in a busy, highly trafficked area of Lyon north of the station in the district of Villeurbanne. The 10 minute 2 km ride turned out to take almost an hour, complicated by numerous traffic lights, rush hour traffic, confusing bike lanes, and our admittedly general ineptitude. Komoot routed us through a park but the park was blocked by construction so our adjusted route passed by the hotel with no ability to enter. We wound up going through this complicated turnstile clearly not designed for bikes or panniers, and had to do so twice because we originally went in the wrong direction.
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We at last arrived, dripping wet, at our accommodation, Hotel les Congres, which I think is associated with a nearby University. It was suitable for our needs, but felt vaguely dorm-like. It had a small bar and self-serve food but was pretty basic. We parked our bikes in the luggage area which turned out to be a conference room, and that allowed us to recharge our bikes without having to take out the batteries. The blue tile in our bathroom was shocking but I neglected to take a picture so you will just have to take my word for it. The tub was great though as was the beer I scored for Dave in the little bar downstairs.
We were on a bit of a tight schedule because I had booked a table at a local bouchon, Le Sully. For those non-foodie types, bouchons are the famous Lyonnaise restaurants developed when Lyon was famous for its silk weaving industry beginning in the 17th century. The restaurant was about 2 km away. I had been thinking we would walk but it was pouring rain at 7:30 and there was no convenient public transport. We wound up calling an Uber (13 euros each way). Fortunately, Le Sully turned out to be great; small, charming, and delicious. I had a Salade Lyonnaise that included a ton of lardons. Dave declined picking either the calf’s head or the veal livers for our main dish and we split a more mundane but still wonderful veal breast and loin with vegetables main course. We had a bottle of Gigondas which Dave couldn’t resist once he saw it on the menu, and thought of our friends Jeff and Allyson, with whom we had a memorable time in and around Gigondas in the fall of 2021!
So, the effort and cost of the Uber turned out to be worth it but we commented to each other that we had to stop eating like this every night. We get on the road for real tomorrow.
Today's ride: 2 km (1 miles)
Total: 53 km (33 miles)
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