France Post #12 - Last Days

Sunday, May 25 - Tuesday, May 27

On Sunday we went to church. Spencer talked with some of the members he knew and we arranged to go visit them. We had dinner with the Razinemientas (no idea how to spell it, but it's fun to say!) They are a beautiful family from an island near Madagascar and Sister R is an amazing cook! I tried my best to follow their French and broken English through dinner, and then we played Spot It! together.

On Monday, we did our best to finish up all the little things left on our to-do list. It was our last day in France. We took a couple pictures in this big mirror thing by the metro stop we used. 

We went to the beach in Marseille. Mostly because I wanted to use my new swimsuit. The water was cold, but it was nice to lay in the sand. Er, gravel. :) 

We set off to find a pastry shop so I could try this meringue that I wanted to try earlier in the week. Also, we took a picture by the carousel. This is in La Canibierre, close to our apartment and the port. I think we also had a couple more souvenirs to buy for people.  

I took pictures of the apartment we stayed in, too. Our kitchen.

The bathroom. I loved that shower head. It was awesome.

Our living room/ pull out futon. There was a sliding door in the wall that we could close and that white futon was actually really comfortable.

We also packed up all of our things and cleaned up so we'd be ready to go bright and early the next morning. We were going to meet a family named the Fidalgos for dinner, but some kind of emergency came up and they couldn't meet us. The Tomasinis heard about our dilemma (we were kind of stuck at a bus stop with no phone to figure out what was going on.) and ended up picking us up to have pizza with them. It was fun. They spoke really good English so I felt included. They helped us arrange a taxi for the next morning and showed us the route they should take us on to the train station (so we wouldn't be overcharged and driven around for a few extra miles) when they drove us home after dinner. 

On Tuesday morning at about 4, we caught our taxi from our apartment on Rue Fortia to the train station. 

From there, we took our bus to the airport, waited for staff to show up so we could check in (really), and started our long series of flights home. We flew Marseille to Paris, Paris to Seattle, and Seattle to SLC. I thought I was going to die on our long flight. My feet were so incredibly swollen and there wasn't really room to walk around. Pregnancy problems. Luckily, there was an empty seat by us so we had a little extra room to stretch out. Our trip to France was so incredible. It was fun, adventurous, and romantic. All the things we were hoping for and so much more. We will treasure these memories forever.

France Trip Post #11 - Lyon

Saturday, May 24

This was our last Saturday in France. We used up our 5th and last train pass day and went to Lyon! I think there was my favorite city that we visited.  It was clean and beautiful and we didn't really have an agenda before we got there. We bought a metro pass for the day and took it to a big plaza. (I'm writing this months later and trying to remember how the day went based on the pictures we took.) The plaza had really cool statues and a good view of that big cathedral on the hill.

Then we ran into this AMAZING and huge market. They were selling everything kind of fruit, cheese, and meat you could think of! We bought some grapes and wandered through a lot of it. 

Then we walked across the bridge and found a place by the river to sit and eat our grapes. It was a beautiful day.

We decided to make our way toward La Basilique Notre Dame Fourviere -- the giant cathedral on the hill. We took a metro and ended up in a district at the bottom of the hill with lots of shops. Like the picture below. I bet you think that's a real shop, but it's not! 

It's a tiny replica of a printing shop. Pretty cool, huh? 

Then we found this! St. Jean Baptiste Cathedral. It was beautiful. There were a lot of tourist shops around this, so we bought our magnet. The magnet had 4 pictures of famous places in Lyon, so we decided to find all 4 of them before we left! 

We stopped for a patisserie. It tasted as good as it looks. 

More cool fountains. 

The map we had showed a tram that went up the hill to the big cathedral, so we took it. Thank goodness we did, because it was a huge, steep hill. I'm not sure my pregnant self would have made it to the top. 

This basilica was, in my opinion, the most impressive of all the basilicas and cathedrals we saw during our trip. It was absolutely gigantic and practically plated in gold. 

This was the lower half/basement:

And the main cathedral: 

This is the view, overlooking the city. To the right is the front of the Basilica that you can see in the first picture of the post.

We decided to take the trail back down the hill. There were some pretty gardens. There were also some "shortcuts" that nearly killed me. But they saved us time! 

Along the way we kept seeing these little makers in the ground, but I never did figure out what they were for.

And then there were these seemingly endless stairs. But at least we were going down rather than up!

The last thing we had left to find was the rose tower. First of all, it looks big in the picture, but it really isn't. Secondly, it's owned by some restaurant and it doesn't actually face the street. We walked past the place like 5 times looking for it before someone gave us directions. It was pretty anticlimactic, but we had a lot of fun finding it!

Lyon was such a fun day! We saw so much of the city, but we still had a few things from our map that we would have visited if we hadn't run out of time. We found our way back to the train station and went back to our little apartment. I think we got back pretty late, so we just spent the rest of the night in and got some rest after all that walking.