Lyon; Sunday, 09 November, 2025

With rain in the forecast until about 10 I took that as an excuse for a bit of a lie in and a late breakfast, after which I packed up and checked out, leaving my bag with the hotel and heading into the city.

My first stop was the Hôtel de Ville, or more importantly the square behind it which is home to the city’s impressive opera house and I spent a bit of time wandering the area taking photos of the buildings and statues. From there it was a short walk north from the squares towards the foot of the Croix-Rousse the second hill of the city that faces Fourvière across the Saône. The hill was home to the Roman city’s amphitheatre and parts of it have been uncovered. Whilst it’s no match for the Coliseum, or even the arenas in Arles or Nîmes it is still an impressive sight, even if you can’t actually get into the grounds and can only view it externally.

I’d expected more of the site to be open, so I had quite a bit more spare time than I was originally planning, so I retraced my steps back to the square by the Town Hall and visited the city’s fine art museum, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon which I spent a little time wandering around before grabbing a quick lunch in a café on the square.

With only a few minutes left on my 48 hour travel pass I hopped on the metro and then a tram to make my way down the length of the Presqu'île to the Jardin du Musée des Confluences. The garden occupies the very end of this peninsular of land as it tapers to a point where the waters of the Saône River flow into the Rhône, it’s an impressive site as both are pretty major rivers at this point.

Located just in front of the gardens is the museum that they are a part of, and I had intended on visiting the museum, but it looks like it’s a popular attraction as there was a pretty long queue for the security check and then it looked like there was a lengthy queue to had to join before you could then join the equally long queue for tickets, and with only about an hour or so left before I needed to start moving I decided that I wouldn’t have time to do the museum justice, so instead I made the decision to have a walk through the city, once I’d picked up my luggage, and go by foot over to the Rhônexpress station by Lyon Part Dieu rather than getting the tram and metro.

I made it back to the hotel quite quickly and after a quick check on the map set off on what was in the end about a 3 mile walk across Lyon, some parts very pretty along the bank of the Rhône, some less so in the less interesting back streets heading towards the station.

With the memories of all the problems on Friday fresh in my mind I wasn’t too worried that I was going to be very early as I’d rather make sure I made it to the Airport with time to spare than have another dash, so I was quite glad to make an early tram out to the airport.

Of course, when you’re running early everything becomes very smooth and I was through security and immigration in less than 10 minutes from entering the terminal building (after about a 15 minute walk from the railway station where the Rhônexpress actually drops off (the local buses on the other hand drop off right outside the terminal building!), helped by immigration deciding the UK passport holders can use their eGates to exit the country.

In the end the running early theme continued through the evening with boarding getting started early and the plane pushing back ahead of schedule, followed by a quicker than expected flight north so that we finally made it to the gate at Heathrow 25 minutes early and with a speedy journey through the airport I was in an Uber and on my way home at the same time as we were originally scheduled to land.