Quit our jobs, sold our home and everything in it, gone riding...

[Lightcycle]

Lover's Locks on the bridge. These are commonplace everywhere in the world!

Jean-Jacques shows us one of the city's official bouchons

A bouchon is a traditional Lyonnais eatery, not a fancy restaurant, but a place where you can nosh on deliciously prepared portions of meat - specifically pork. There are only about 20 official bouchons recognized by the city, and they are tucked away on side streets that many tourists would not otherwise give a second glance at. We take note of a couple of Jean-Jacques favorites.

Murals of Lyon

Lyon is also well-known for its murals painted across many of the buildings in the downtown and the old city. They're not really that old, but there are enough of them scattered all over the place that they give the city a very artistic vibe.

Some of the murals are very lifelike!

Vieux Lyon (Old town) is full of cafes and bistros lining its cobblestone streets

 

[Lightcycle]

Wonder what's behind this door?

There is a hidden city within Lyon. There exist these mysterious passageways known only to locals that go through the ground floor of some of the buildings in the old city. There are many streets that run parallel to the river, but not many that run perpendicular. These passageways called Traboules allow pedestrians a shortcut to get between the parallel streets without having to go around the building to the next block. Kind of like entering the lobby of a building from the south on 1st Street and then exiting on the north door to get out on 2nd Street. Except much cooler... because these are secret!

Exiting a Traboule to get out onto the next street

Beautiful architecture that reach up the height of the buildings inside the narrow enclosed courtyards of the Traboules

Traboules were initially built in the 4th century and allowed the inhabitants to get from the river to the hill more easily. The doors are not marked at all and unless you live here, you need some kind of map or guide to show you where all the Traboules are. This played a huge role in WWII when the local resistance fighters would evade the invading Nazis forces and prevent them from completely taking over the city

All are welcome to use the Traboules, but they need to be quiet and respect the residents who live above them

Traboule entrances also double as the entrances to the buildings themselves

 

[Lightcycle]

Jean-Jacques shows us more cool architecture inside another Traboule

The interior world of the Traboules really reminded me of the movie Dark City
with the claustrophobic buildings that changed configuration every night!

Lyon is world-renowned within the silk and textile industry. Long before WWII, these traboules were used by workers to transport their goods from the mills and workshops at the top of the hill to the merchants near the river. In fact, Jean-Jacques was in the textile business before he retired. As we walked around the old town, he weaved together stories of the history of Lyon with his own life story of growing up in this city. It made it so much more personal.

We're not sure what we want to do when our trip ends, but being a tour guide sure seems like a lot of fun!

Back out in the old city, a cruiser roars past us on the cobblestone roads

Saint-Jean Cathedral

Hanging out at Place Bellecour with Louis XIV looking down upon us

 

[Lightcycle]

Another local secret

Jean-Jacques also pointed out on the map this great viewpoint that is in a little park hidden away on one of the hills overlooking the city. There's a plaque up there that informed us that Lyon is the sister city to Montreal! A Canadian connection!

We had done a lot hiking today, so we took a nap on one of the benches and woke up to a great view of the city.

Statue by the foot of the river

During WWII, this building was hit by a bomb that didn't explode, but left a scar on its face instead

Palais de Justice, right on the river bank

Lyon also has an amphitheatre! Of course, Neda has to investigate and report her findings back to the city officials in Pula.

Lyon is a really picturesque city. We are getting a much different impression of France than the one we got when we skirted the French Riviera last winter. It also helps that we've got a local to help guide and organize what we are seeing. I think part of our travel-fatigue stems from the effort needed to research all the things we want to see and do.

 

[Lightcycle]

Brilliant, bright blue day above the old buildings of Lyon

We picked an amazing day for sightseeing! Yesterday's ride and today's weather gave us a bit of a boost to our travel-weary spirits. I'm wary that our moods do seem to be on a bit of a roller-coaster, but perhaps the warm season ahead in comfortable surroundings will give us a bit of an even keel.

 

[Thom]

GREAT presentation by Gene and Neda tonight!!!! They covered so many aspects of their three year and counting journey. Living the life!!! My only regret was that I could not stay till the end. It was tough to get up when I had to leave. Thanks to both of you for sharing in this way!

 

[meme]

Agreed! They are my fave celebs! You guys did a great job.

 

[Face]

Great job last night! Good to finally meet. It's nice that you decided to share all the little interesting bits and personal comments about the experience. Thanks for doing this, and I hope there's sun when you get back to the European riding season!

 

[busabim]

Nice to meet the Toronto celebs in person, there were at least 50 people there in the rather warm section of the garage at Endras.

Very interesting comments and questions passed about travelling/planning for a lengthy trip.

BB

 

[Rick CH]

I was inspired to get a GS and hit the road! Then I saw the HP4 in the showroom on the way out...

Great to see you guys and excellent presentation!

 

[Lightcycle]

Hi guys, Neda and I would like to thank everyone who came to the presentation. We had so much fun interacting with everyone, there was so much interest and many questions, we're sorry that we ran out of time.

It was really great meeting all of you in person as well, especially after all the PMs on GTAM!

there in the rather warm section of the garage

Right? I'm glad I wasn't the only one. I was sweating like a pig up there!

 

[Lightcycle]

Updated from http://www.RideDOT.com/rtw/224.html

Aaaand we're tired again.

We rode further north underneath grey skies, typical of early spring in France. Branches are bare, the air is cold and the boring straight roads dump our weary bikes onto the outskirts of Dijon. We're staying at another AirBnB and our host Alain greets us at the apartment. Alain speaks only a bit of English - unfortunately about as much French as I do, but when he sees our bikes, I can sense that he really wants to ask us questions about our trip, but discussing anything above and beyond logistics just devolves into pantomimes and hapless, confused shrugs.

I really wished I had paid more attention in French classes at school. This is turning out to be the biggest regret of this trip - that I had the opportunity not just to learn another language, but to do it at an age when my brain was way more malleable such that new languages would come easier later on in life, like the way it does with Neda.

This church looked interesting, so we stopped for a break

Neda is Shocked to discover her bike can't use these charging stations.

We've actually chosen to stay in Dijon because we're meeting a couple of Internet friends here! Colleen and Dan are American ex-pats living in nearby Switzerland just a couple of hours away and when I mentioned to them our planned route, they volunteered to meet us along the way. Colleen is very active on the forums and has written up several of her motorcycle trips, but since she used to live on the west coast, I've never actually met her. But that didn't stop her from greeting us at our apartment with a big smile and a hug! Funny how you can feel like you know someone without ever having seen them in person!

We spent a nice evening over dinner chatting about bikes, Europe, travel - all things near and dear to our hearts. This animated discussion continued over breakfast the next day and I realized we were so engrossed in the great conversation that I hadn't taken any pictures! So as they were leaving to head back to Switzerland:

Wishing Colleen and Dan a safe trip back to Switzerland! See you again, soon!

We had been in Dijon for a few days now, just vegging in the apartment that we hadn't even made it outside to see the old city. Supposedly it was quite pretty. We're really dragging our feet to do any kind of sightseeing, but before leaving Dijon, we made a half-hearted effort to see the historic centre.

Cobble-stone roads mark our destination

 

[Lightcycle]

Rows of chimera on the Church of Notre-Dame

Inside Notre-Dame, beautiful!

And my favorite - candles.

We walk around the old city and stumble upon a merry-go-round

Buildings showing off their half-timbered frames are examples of "colombage" architecture which is very common in France

And of course, when you're Dijon, you have to try the Dijon mustard!

They say the best Dijon mustard is Edmond Fallot. We have never seen so many flavours of Dijon mustard! We visited the factory store downtown. It was a lot of fun trying all the different flavours until the store kicked us out when it was evident we weren't going to buy anything... So expensive! We're planning to pick some up in a grocery store where we know it will be cheaper than in the tourist district!

 

[Lightcycle]

Hobos 4 Life! Window shopping...

Well, that was nice. Let's go!

Leaving Dijon

Onwards to Paris!!! Well, not quite...

We're still so tired, so we've booked into another AirBnB apartment in Vauréal, a suburb just 40 minutes north-west of the city. We've waited all winter to see Northern Europe and now that we're here, we don't really feel like going out. I don't feel so bad hibernating inside because the weather has been so grey, cold and rainy.

Our little suburban hideaway

Marielle, our AirBnB host, has welcomed us into her apartment by leaving us with a bottle of wine and a tub of something called terrine, which looks and tastes like pâté. I asked what the difference was, she couldn't explain, but she said it was *definitely* not pâté! I looked it up later on the Internet and still couldn't understand the difference. It seemed to be one of those funny Parisian je-ne-sais-quoi-mais-il-n'est-pas-pâté-certainement! But terrine turned out to be one of our favorite foods, and we kept going to and from the grocery store to buy more tubs of I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Pâté....

 

[Lightcycle]

Neda has found a new hobby!

For a while now, Neda's been plagued with a lack of a hobby. Unlike the blog, which I pretend to keep updated (but actually never do), she needs something to occupy herself. She's read over a thousand books while we've been on this trip, she's on Level 9,372 on Candy Crush and she's slowly going out of her mind. While I'm content to read and write, take pictures and edit videos, my wife is more of a hands-on kind of person and needs something physical to do, which is why she likes cooking, hiking, yoga, etc.

She's found the perfect hobby in needle-point. It's keeps her hands busy, is portable enough for motorcycle travel and she really enjoys it. Neda told me it was something her mom used to as well.

I've been so worried about Neda's mood for a long time now, but already I sense a change from her previous bouts of restlessness.

Dropping Neda off at the airport. In the rain, of course...

Since we're staying in Vauréal for a while, we looked into flights to Italy so Neda could visit her sister and niece for a long weekend. I knew RyanAir flights were cheap, but I didn't know that it literally costs €19 to fly from Paris to Milan. It cost us more in gas to ride from Vaureal to the airport and back... Crazy!

So off she went! And while Neda spent time with family, I had a grand ole time not updating the blog and gorging myself on terrine!

With Neda back from Italy, our social calendar fills up in Vauréal

Marielle moved into her boyfriend's place while we stayed in her apartment and she invited us over for dinner one evening. They just lived down the street from us!

Hanging out with Marielle and Stefane

Our hosts were so friendly and gracious and although their English was not very good, it was still better than my French, and we were able to share a little bit about all of ourselves. I really like seeing how other people around the world live their everyday lives, how some things are so similar to us, and how other things may look and taste like pâté but are not.

Sorry, I can't let it go. It's pâté.

Stefane cooking us a traditional French meal from the region with cornish hen. Merveilleux!

We were introduced to Stefane's little boy, and they both encouraged him to practice his English with us. We spent the evening huddled around an iPad and an atlas sharing the pictures we had taken and pointing out where we had gone on the map. I realized that Marielle and Stefane were seizing the opportunity to demonstrate to Stefane's son how important it was to learn English.

And if things go according to plan, there'll be an additional future world traveler able to learn and converse in multiple languages wandering around this planet!

 

[Lightcycle]

Updated from http://www.RideDOT.com/rtw/225.html

So we've been here in Vauréal for over a week now, perched 40 minutes away from the most famous city in the world and we still haven't left the apartment to go visit it.

Everyday we find some excuse not to ride in to see Paris: "Looks like it's going to rain today", "We woke up too late", "Gotta go to the grocery store to buy more terrine..."

But one day we ran out of excuses, so we hopped on the bikes and headed into the city

The landscape here is fairly flat, the smell of fresh manure wafting up through our helmets as we ride by the green fields that lie between all the quaint towns between Vauréal and Paris. We picked a weekday to go, staying off the highway, and we're rewarded by having the roads all to ourselves.

The back roads to Paris

Traffic is not so bad in the big city!

Marielle had advised us beforehand not to ride in Paris because of the congestion and the crazy drivers. We've heard this warning before in every major city we've been to and no offense intended to those giving us this advice, but they're probably not aware of all the places that we've ridden in and that our definition of "bad traffic and crazy drivers" is very different than theirs.

After riding through the pure pandemonium they call traffic in Delhi, Bogotá and Mexico City, motorcycling through Paris and Rome is like strolling carefree through an open field.

Basilica of the Sacré Cœur in Montmartre

One of the places Marielle recommended for us to see was Montmartre. Situated on top of a hill overlooking the rest of Paris, it used to be an area of the city that was filled with bohemians and artists at the turn of the last century. In fact, Montmartre is right next to the Moulin Rouge. But any of the low-rent, ramshackle buildings occupied by writers and painters who voluntarily gave up their aristocracy to pursue "la vie boheme" have now been replaced by restaurants and souvenir shops catering to the hordes of tourists who visit every day.

Speaking of which...

 

[Lightcycle]

Moulin Rouge is where the Can-Can was invented. Here, you can pay €4 for a can-can of soda...

What is more stereotypical than street-side bistros in Paris?

Store all prettied up for the tourists

While walking around, we stumbled upon the market on Rue Daguerre, a pedestrian-only street with fruit and vegetable stands enticing passersby. You can duck in and out of all the fromageries lining the avenue. There are tons of these market streets all over the city and they felt a bit more authentic and local-oriented than the tourist traps that we came from.

Rue Daguerre

Obviously you can't see all of Paris in a day, which is exactly the time we've given ourselves to do. So we each picked a couple of places of interest and we rode around the city, crossing them off one by one. And once again, we parked pretty much anywhere we wanted without paying any fees! I love motorcycling in Europe!

Two-wheelers crammed on every square inch of sidewalk. For free!!!

 

[Lightcycle]

Catacombs

One of the places on my list were the catacombs underneath the city, the main reason being that I read about it in "The Da Vinci Code". There are many tours in the city based on the book, but they're all too expensive, so no Louvre for us, just the creepy catacombs, please.

Spooky skulls

Our tour underneath the city yielded some very interesting facts. The catacombs serve as a mass storage site for the remains of 6 million people who lived in the Paris area over the last 300 years. They were originally moved from cemetaries because of overcrowding of the bodies, leading to improper burial, bad smell and the spread of disease.

Some of the bones are placed in pretty patterns, like this heart-shaped arrangement

At many points, there are small signs pointing out the date of the bones. It was interesting seeing how the older ones from the 1700s were much more yellow and worn-looking. It was slightly creepy being around all these dead bodies, but yet strangely fascinating at the same time!

A shrine set amongst the bones

There are about 300 kms of tunnels that make up the catacombs, but only about a 1.5 km stretch is open to the public. The rest of it are not renovated for tours, but that hasn't stopped "cataphiles" from breaking in and exploring the labyrinths underneath the city. Some of them are urban explorers, but others hold parties or meetings in the darkened spaces under Paris. In 2004, police found a whole movie theater set up in the catacombs!

 

[Lightcycle]

We emerged above ground far from where we entered and had to consult a map to get back to our motorcycles. It was Neda's turn to pick an interesting Parisian spot to explore.

This washroom was self-cleaning. And free! Very cool.

Neda has very different tastes than most people. In restaurants, she's always ordering the more unusual items, and it's the same when it comes to sightseeing. What caught her interest was a park called the Promenade Plantee. You can actually see it in the picture above, the park is elevated above the city streets to give it a bit of isolation away from the traffic of the city.

The Promenade Plantee used to be an old elevated railroad which was torn out and replaced with a narrow garden that stretches through Paris. Stairs to get to the park are situated every few hundred meters and once you are strolling above, the big city seems to disappear.

Feels just like walking in the countryside!

And then you look over the edge...

Paris was nice, but we weren't in the right mood to truly soak up the City of Love. At least by foot. So we hopped on our bikes and just rode around town.

At one point, we passed by this structure. I radioed Neda, "Hey, is that the...? naaaah, couldn't be...."

But when I checked the pictures later on and cross-referenced it on the Internet, it was! We totally rode past the Arc de Triomphe. Kinda unassuming in person...

Little photoshoot on the streets of Paris

Being on bikes was waaaay more fun than walking around the city. The traffic in the middle of this weekday was light and it seemed it was too early in the season for tourists and their tour buses to clog up the streets. I consulted my GPS and headed towards:

The Eiffel Tower!

This was also an item on my list. Again, we approached the spot where my GPS said it would be and I looked over at the structure peaking above the trees. I radioed Neda, "I think that's the Eiffel Tower, but it looks kinda short. Maybe it's a miniature? And the real one is somewhere closeby?"

But when we got there, it turned out that it was the real Eiffel Tower. I guess we're used to "towers" being as tall as our CN Tower back home...? *shrug*

Sightseeing is soooo much better on two-wheels!

We're glad we got to visit Paris, especially riding around the city which was super-fun. Which reinforces the fact that although we might be tired of sight-seeing, we still *LOVE* riding our motorcycles! But we do need a long rest, and we know just the place to find it...

 

[Roadghost]

Nice.