Saturday, Lilian and I biked up to the north of the city for a picnic in the Parc de la Tête d’Or. Lyon has many wonderful qualities, but greenspace is not entirely one of them. There are other parks, to be sure, but not as many as you’d expect to find in a city of its size. The Tête d’Or (Head of Gold) is the main event.
We rented eBikes using Vélo’v, which is the local bikeshare service. Lilian and I decided to go with the eBike option, because it was supposed to be a relaxing sort of day. And what could be more relaxing than taking a gentle ride along the river?
Of course, it seems like half of Lyon had the same idea as us. We got there and all of the nearby Velo’v stations were full up. We ended up having to backtrack just to find a place to park. Communal living is great (it’s so much nicer to pay a few euros to use a bike than it is to purchase and maintain one!), but every system has its drawbacks.
We set up a blanket in the shade and had a picnic lunch of sandwiches from a boulangerie. There was some great people watching with lots of different groups around us. There were a bunch of small children dragging sticks around for some sort of game, teenagers playing spikeball, and all sorts of people who have very different ideas about what one should wear to a picnic.
For the most part, we enjoyed our food in peace. Although a couple of geese made it very clear that they wanted a bite of our cookies, thankyouverymuch. Based on their attitude of “well of course you’re going to share,” I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a lot of people feed them.
Or maybe they were just being geese.
Geese are kindof the jerks of the animal kingdom.
I’m working through some ideas for a project that I’m putting together, so I did some brainstorming in my notebook (I made Lilian promise that we’d go screen-free and then I kindof had to stick with it). As a little bonus for writing things out long-hand, Lilian helped me with my brainstorming and we came up with a couple of clever ideas!
We moved out into the sun for the most important part of our picnic: lounging around doing nothing. I took out my Kobo (eReader) and Lilian worked on a crochet project. I tried to close my eyes for a little park nap, but my daughter had different ideas.
Note to self: next time bring a book for her so she doesn’t go “mom. Mom. MOM” every five minutes.
We’re so far west in our time zone, I sometimes forget how late it really is. It was still pleasantly warm, but we had to drag ourselves from our blanket if we wanted to say hi to the giraffes.
I mean, when do you not want to say hi to the giraffes?
The Tête d’Or has a little zoo in it. It’s free to the public, which is pretty cool. Usually, little zoos have pretty basic animals but this one has giraffes! You can see them pretty close up, too. There’s something about being 20 feet away from a giraffe that makes you really thing… “wow, these are some wild-ass animals.” I mean, their necks. Those prehensile black tongues.
Giraffes are really freaking cool and really freaking weird all at the same time. I love them.
We tried to check out the monkeys and the red pandas, but the zoo was so crowded we couldn’t get anywhere near them. Note to potential tourists: if you want to wander around the zoo, try to go on a day when it’s not so busy.
From the zoo, we wandered over to the botanical garden. This was decidedly less crowded. Maybe because it has 100% fewer giraffes? There are some really lovely plants and flowers there, as well as some cool old-fashioned looking greenhouses. We really wanted to check out the carnivorous plants, but we were too close to closing time and they were just locking that greenhouse up when we got there.
It’s always good to have something that you want to see next time, right?
There were a few areas with signs indicating that there were no plants there because they’d been stolen (and listing the criminal and civil penalties for stealing from the botanical garden). Which prompted this deep conversation…
Lilian: why would someone steal from a botanical garden?
Me: some people just suck.
We wandered around the “jardin d’ombre.” It translates to shady garden, although I think shadow garden would be far more mysterious and spooky. I imagine the shade must be really nice on a hot day!
Sometimes it’s weird to not have a backyard or green space of our own. But, it’s so much nicer to go sit somewhere that someone else is in charge of mowing!
