A little more than 10 years after our first visit to Lyon, we’re back. This is our 18th stop on our whirlwind tour and only the third place we’ve ever been before; all of the remaining stops will be new to us. While a lot of things have changed in those 10 years – seen massive amounts of the world, sold our software company, moved to New York – one thing remained the same: we’re at the same M Gallery hotel we stayed at back then. We loved it back then and we still like it a lot and while I certainly don’t remember every detail of it it’s definitely familiar.

One quick note on getting here. We’re moving by train these days and these French trains are simply amazing. I don’t think we’ve left so much as a minute late on a single trip. They’re comfortable, fast, smooth, relaxing – everything you want in travel. We like it best when you can reserve your seats but even when that’s not possible it’s such a pleasant way to travel. I’ve noticed, too, that you almost never hear anyone talking above a whisper or at most a quiet voice. And no one listing to their phone on speaker; people seem genuinely respectful of the other people around them. And while it almost always takes longer to go by train than to drive – especially the trip to Clermont, which required three trains – the time is so relaxing. I’m getting more reading and napping done than if I were, say, driving (when apparently you’re not supposed to do either) and I love watching the summer fields go by. The sunflowers and corn and hay fields and sunflowers and corn and corn and corn.

There were two problems with this stop. One, it’s freaking hot. It was 97 degrees much of the day on our one full day in Lyon and that’s just too hot. We were concerned when we planned the trip that in this time of climate change Europe is getting too hot in the summer. Well, the first few weeks were fabulous, almost too cold (though we did not complain). If we’d spent weeks like this it would be a very different experience.

We went out in the morning to explore the old city a bit and then go up the funicular to the Basilica when the temperature was pleasantly in the mid-70s. After that, though, damn. All you want to do is sit in your air conditioned room but even most nice hotels in France aren’t built to handle this kind of heat. We went to lunch and as happens with almost shocking frequency we sit at an outdoor table in the shade, under an umbrella or awning and everything is fine. Sure it’s hot but you’re sitting in the shade. Ten or 15 minutes later you see that the sun is creeping your way and suddenly you’re broiling. You move to something that looks as though it will stay in the shade but no, the sun finds you again. It’s happened on multiple occasions this trip. You’d think we could figure out how to avoid that but you would be wrong.

Oh, and the other problem. We arrived on Saturday, when most things are closed including lots and lots of restaurants, particularly in August. Then our one full day is Sunday, when everything is closed. Between the heat and the August Sunday this seems like one dead city. I look at our pictures from Lyon 10 years ago and realize, “Yeah, weekdays in April might be a better time to be here…”

And one other noticeable thing. For one of the first stops since we left Paris you hear people speaking English, and North American English at that. So many of our stops the tourists are almost all French, with a few Germans and other weirdos. Almost no Americans, though, until Lyon.

From here we head up towards the Alps and then down to the beach so we should soon be seeing more temperate weather.

Our 16th stop on this jaunt around France was Cahors, a city of 20,000 in southwest France just a couple hours north of Toulouse. Cahors is all but surrounded by the River Lot as it makes a big looping curve to encircle the city on three sides. It makes for a lovely, compact town with an historic center and fabulous medieval bridge.

Certainly the most interesting, even iconic site in Cahors is the Valentré Bridge, dating from the 14th century. These days it is still used as a footbridge to cross the Lot and is part of the Camino de Santiago, linking Le Puy-en-Velay, France, to Santiago, Spain. And indeed as we wandered around the old town we saw more than a couple hikers who sure looked as though they were heading to Spain.

Two things about the town stood out to me besides the bridge. First, this is the center of the Cahors wine district, a strictly defined area of Malbec wines. And while we are by far more familiar with the Malbecs of Argentina (which, of course, came from France), the Cahors Malbecs were really good and some of the darkest wines – almost black – I’ve ever had.

The other thing I love about Cahors is a piece of history. In medieval times Cahors financiers actually charged interest on loans. Today that doesn’t seem so unusual but at the time usury, as it was known, was a terrible sin. They were so infamous that the word Cahorsins became synonymous with usury throughout much of Western Europe. In fact, in Dante’s Inferno he ranked Cahors right along Sodom as a city of sin. Cool!

So here we are in Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city. This was planned as just another of those French cities we’ve never been to, but then it got added value for us when first our friend Gena figured out that she could come at the same time and then suggested to her friend Carol that she come too. Gena & Carol are both classical musicians and both were performing in Europe this summer, so why not come through Toulouse, right?

Actually Gena comes here pretty regularly. She has a great friend from New York, Kiki, who after COVID moved with her husband Yaron to a country house in the area that had been her parents second home. There’s an interesting back story there. Her father was French, but not from that region. He did, however, join the resistance during WW II and served in the area. He moved to New York after the war, but when they were looking for a second residence, it was the place with the most meaning to him. Apparently he was deeply respected in the community and when he died, they brought his body back here to be buried with great ceremony. Buried in the Protestant cemetery, amusingly, even though he was Jewish, because of course you couldn’t bury a Jew in the Catholic cemetery!

At any rate on one glorious day the three of us – Mark, Gena, and Kiki – took a train about an hour out to the tiny town of Puylaurens where Yaron (Kiki’s Israeli-born husband) picked us up for the 10-minute drive to their … castle? That’s what Gena calls it, and it is in fact a few hundred years old with a couple of towers. I don’t know how many acres it sits on but it’s all by itself on a hill overlooking miles and miles of gorgeous fields. Kiki & Yaron had prepared this glorious lunch of fresh local produce with delightful wine from their daughter’s own winery. We just sat outside – in the shade thank goodness – and had pretty much a perfect afternoon.

A word or two about Toulouse. As I said after Paris, Marseille, and Lyon it is the fourth largest city. Sitting on the River Garonne, it is the capital of the Region of Occitania and, with the headquarters of Airbus, is the center of the European aerospace industry. To be honest, we didn’t see any aerospacing going on, but I believe them that it’s there. Because of the peculiar brick used in many of the buildings of the old city it is known as the Pink City.

We didn’t do a lot of sight-seeing in Toulouse, in part because we spent one full day out in the country. The one must-see site, though, is the Basilica of Saint-Sernin, one of the two largest remaining Romanesque buildings in Europe. The original church on the site gained fame when, according to legend, Charlemagne himself gave them hundreds of relics; i.e., bones of dead saints. As more and more pilgrims came to worship the relics the town fathers decided to build a vastly larger space to accommodate all those tourists. When you tour the church you don’t actually see many bones but you do see a lot of reliquaries that supposedly have parts of dead saints in them. Seems morbid to me, but I’m not Catholic. Over the centuries, though, it was a big deal and became an important stop on the part of the Camino de Santiago – the Way of St. James – that ran from Arles in Provence across the Pyrenees to Santiago de Campostela in Spain.

So that was Toulouse – meals with friends, touring an old church, and an afternoon in the country. And for me, sadly, limping painfully after smashing my toe on an unexpected step in the bathroom when I got up in the middle of the night. Painful, but perhaps not unexpected when you stay in strange hotels too often. Now it’s off to Cahors as we continue our trek into central France.