The second day in Lyon we only had a few hours before catching a ride share to our next workaway. We go to the sprawling, Parc de la Tete d’Or. It’s an easy walk from the apartment.
It’s a cold gray day and we walk around the central lake and enter another section of the park… we see these flamingos! We realize we are in a zoo… a free zoo! We only have about 30 minutes to look so we rush around, trying to see as much as we can before we have to go back to the apartment, make lunch, then get to the train station to catch a ride to our next Workaway. We are practically running around trying to see everything and taking photos!
Whew! We eventually drag each other outta there and back up to the apartment, eat lunch, get our backpacks on and hop on a couple of subways to reach our driver. Then the madness begins, we wait and wait, no driver. Finally I am able to get wifi from a tour bus parked near us and read an email from our driver saying to go to a different station. Cursing her all the way we go to the other station, she’s not there either! We go back to the original meeting place and of course she isn’t there either. We are upset, to say the least! We are supposed to be meeting our hostess at a certain time and now we will be super late.
We decide to go to a hotel and ask to use their wifi. The concierge is incredibly nice and lets us use the wifi, we email our hostess about the situation and we find another rideshare. I need to call the rideshare since it is just going to be passing through Lyon and we need to coordinate a meeting place. I ask the concierge where the nearest payphone is and he insists I use the phone there at the front desk! Once connected with the driver I am having so much trouble understanding, even though she passed the phone to an english speaking passenger, the concierge asks for the phone back and collets all the info we need! So amazing, he even takes out a map and marks the route of subways we will need to take to reach the station on the outskirts of the city where our driver will pick us up! We are so incredibly grateful to have someone on our side in the midst of so much chaos!
Long story shortish, from that point on everything else goes smoothly! We reach our destination! We are picked up by Leon, our hostesses son and he drives us to the castle! Where we have been working for 2 weeks now! I write this on our last day here, determined to catch up on these blog posts!!
sierrajohnrambleon 