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biking in hilly Lyon with bad brakes
Thursday, October 27 2016
Off the east bank of the Rhone, Lyon, France
Gretchen went off into Lyon this morning without me while I stayed on the boat drinking robot-made coffee and dicking around on my laptop.
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Lunches on the Scenic Sapphire are partly buffet, but there's an entree as well that is delivered individually by waiters. Today's was a veggie burger custom-designed by the vegan menu coordinator. It was pretty good, though it did have a tendency to fall apart. As we were eating these things, Gretchen excitedly told me that actually Lyon was a beautiful city and that judging it by the part we'd walked through last night was like judging Kingston by walking around 9W near the Home Depot. Fair enough.
So we borrowed a pair of pedal-assist bikes and headed off across two bridges to the hilly western side of the city. Like Pittsburgh, Lyon is built at the confluence of two rivers (in Pittsburgh, of course, the confluence produces a "third river," though that's a clerical error, not a geographic phenomenon). The part we'd seen had been just east of the Rhone. But once we crossed the Rhone, crossed a peninsula between it and the Saône, and crossed the Saône, we would be in a place full of Roman ruins and other delights. Our bikes easily took us up the hill to a massive castle-like church called La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière at its summit, where the church forms part of the distinctive Lyon skyline. We went inside and it was over-the-top, with large Byzantine-style murals covering parts of the wall that were otherwise encrusted with carvings, statuary, decorations, and what might have been top-end wallpaper. The style was all very ancient (actually pre-Gothic), and so it was easy to assume it actually was ancient. But everything was in absolutely mint condition. The floor was completely level and smooth, there were no cracks in the walls or columns, and there was no uneven discoloration of anything. Eventually we learned that the church had been built relatively recently, in the late 19th Century, with some interior details being completed in 1964, at around the time my brother was born. On some level, then, what we were seeing was the McMansion of French Basilicas. It had been built with private money, mostly, it seems, as a right-wing expression of victory against the threat of socialism. Remember, it was built a little less than a hundred years after the French Revolution, one of the goals of which had been to dechristianize France.
We took a stairway down to "the crypt," and what we found down there was essentially a whole other church, complete with high vaulted ceilings and even windows (though these were set high on the walls). Because this church had to support the massive weight of another church, the columns were all massive and chunky. Much less effort had gone into the decor of the crypt, though there were numerous alcoves with lists of names, mostly of those who had died in the First World War.
From the Basilica, we biked downhill towards the southeast. At this point it became clear that the brakes on my bicycle were in terrible shape. I could use them to keep from accelerating, but they couldn't bring me to a stop, at least not on this hill. We parked at an Roman amphitheatre, looked around, and then discovered there was an entirely different, bigger amphitheatre directly adjacent to it. We sat for a time on the stone "seats" of the bigger amphitheatre while Gretchen plotted where we'd be going next. I didn't really care.
We walked our bikes down cramped, bustling streets where crepe vendors made crêpes as people watched. There was the young woman who wasn't very good and there was the guy for whom crêpe making was clearly an art. (I didn't actually see the crêpe artist, but Gretchen had earlier today.)
Our biking eventually took us across the Saône and then north, up to a steep series of streets (some of which included steps) to a hilltop district called Croix-Rousse. Somewhere near there, Gretchen was on the sidewalk on her over-eager electrically-powered bicycle and nearly ran into the young girl being led by an Arab woman. There wasn't much to see in Croix-Rousse aside from a makeshift fairground (including scream-inducing rides), so we turned south and ended up at the gorgeously baroque City Hall (Hôtel de Ville). Unfortunately, the adjacent Place des Terreaux was under construction and there wasn't a good place to sit down and admire it.
Back at the boat, I was sure to tell the staff about my bike's terrifying brake problems. It's possible this had been the very bike that had sent that anorexic woman into intensive care. (I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that nobody had checked the bike after that accident to see if problems with it had been contributing factors.)
I returned to my spot in the lounge near the bow to do some more work using my laptop. As I did so, I saw one of the Frenchiest scenes ever. I saw a long loaf of french bread floating down the Saône, and right there with it were a male and female pair of mallard ducks furiously pecking at it to dislodged little waterlogged bits. This went on for awhile before it attracted the notice of first one, then several, then many seagulls. They'd hover almost patiently, then swoop in between the ducks to snag a little piece. There was plenty for everyone; I'm sure that, unseen beneath the surface, there were fish attacking the bread from below.
Unfortunately, the part of the lounge I like to work in gets taken over for yoga in the late afternoon whenever the upper deck is closed for low bridges or unpleasant weather. So this meant that I had to eventually abandon my spot. I think today was the one day that Gretchen actually participated in what I jokingly termed "fart-friendly yoga."
Our boat often seemed to schedule its use of locks for around yoga time (a process Gretchen described as "like being in the trash compactor on the Death Star"). Today, though, it did a different manuever, somehow making a three-point turn in the Rhone, going downstream to the confluence with the Saône, and then heading upriver on that. At Lyon, you see, our voyage would be leaving the Rhone (which heads east to Geneva, 70 miles away) and proceeding north up the Saône instead.
Usually we sit at a six-top table in the dining room, but today we sat at a four-top near the buffet island with Nathan and Christina, our friends from Salt Lake City. The menu didn't really look to my liking, but the kohlrabi and potatoes proved unexpectedly delicious. I thought perhaps our smaller table and central location were responsible for the noticeably-better service we seemed to be getting, but then the lights went black in the dining room, which is what always happens when a sparkler-adorned birthday cheesecake is coming out of the kitchen for someone having a birthday. That cake ultimately came to our table; it was Christina's 37th. She and Nathan look good for their age; evidently a vegan diet, biking, and avoiding drugs & alcohol can be a recipe for a prolonged youth.
Our experience on the boat has been a good and even luxurious one, though this is not to say there haven't been glitches along the way. The longer we've been on the boat, the more our bathroom has smelled like sewer gas. And there's also been a problem in our cabin with diesel fumes being blown in through the ventillation system. This evening those fumes were so bad that Gretchen went out to the lounge to hang out, and suggested I do the same.
Out in the lounge, I found Gretchen having a long conversation with the male half of another youngish German couple (he had impressive tattoos and wide voids passing through his ear lobes). I went and sat by myself near the bar and continued work on my laptop while a couple women performed live music using a keyboard and violin. In addition to Beatles and John Legend covers, they did some middle-eastern-inflected tune that I really liked. Eventually, though, Dirk, the tall German who had organized the whole voyage, grabbed a microphone and began settling people down for the crew talent show. Gretchen had been talking about how excited she was to see that, but the prospect of sitting through that was not my idea of how I wanted to spend my vacation (especially as sober as I was at the time), so I beat a hasty retreat. Gretchen came running after me, asking me if I was so sure I didn't want to see the talent show. After all this time, did she really know me this poorly? In despair, I whined like a child, "I don't wanna!" I feared she was going to make me make a case for why I didn't want to attend, and it seemed like something I shouldn't have to be doing while on vacation. What I didn't know, though, was that she thought I was mad at her for not hanging out with me when I'd been by myself. But no, I hadn't cared about that at all.
The crazy richness of the vault decorations in the main part of La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière. Click to enlarge.
The crazy floor of the main part of La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière. Click to enlarge.
Looking east from La Basilique Notre Dame de Fourvière. [We'd be spending the night in that tall building with the pyramid on its top in a few days.] Click to enlarge.
The larger of the two Roman amphitheatres. Click to enlarge.
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