Pérouges

By Stephen M on July 31, 2016

Our agenda for today was a day trip out to the intact medieval walled town of Pérouges located about 30km North East of Lyon.  Whilst the town dates back to the 12th century, most of what exists today, dates from the end of the 14th century.

We started off the morning with our hotel breakfast which has become a favourite and we have been very impressed with the accommodation and level of service offered at the Lyon Okko Hotel. (Highly recommended!)

A 30min walk from the hotel to Lyon Part Dieu station found us scrambling to find the quickest way to purchase tickets as we had 10min until departure or face a 2hr wait until the next train and the queue was a mile long! On recruiting the services of a station customer services officer, we were assisted in purchaseing the right tickets from a ticket machine with just enough time to find the correct platform and board the train on time only to discovering that we faced a 1 hr connection time before we would reach our destination. We did however turn this to our advantage! We had been stressing over how we could purchase our outbound tickets to Chamomix via Annecy after discovering just how busy the Lyon Part Dieu station is and we would be attempting to depart during peak hour! The station we had our 1hr layover had a ticket office and with little to no customers to serve, we took the opportunity to purchase our tickets. Sounds easy? Our French ticket officers spoke no English! After feeling a little dejected, we returned using our iPhone showing the tickets required. Using this, our ticket officer then punched in all the details and showed her screen to confirm everything was correct. After a bit of pointing, gesturing and head nodding, we successfully secured our tickets taking the stress out of going through all this at the busy station in Lyon.

Pérouges whilst a tourist town, was thoroughly enjoyable seeing such a well restored and preserved medieval town and as you will see, very photogenic as well. We also enjoyed eating a traditional French meal with a Cider for lunch at one of the local restaurants in the township.

Departing mid afternoon gave us a chance to catch up on some domestics and chill out before an early night.

Click here for more photos!