Tag: Lyon

Hotel review: Kyriad Gare Perrache, Lyon

When choosing a hotel stay for a city break, I like to get the right balance between location, quality and price. The Kyriad Gare Perrache ticked all of those boxes.

Located just a couple of minutes walk from Perrache station, the transport links were second to none. With Metro and tram stops, and an overland railway there was nowhere that wasn’t easily reachable. Also it was just a short walk to Place Bellecour for the city tour bus and walkable to the old town across the river bridge. Location box ticked.

All the reviews I read on TripAdvisor commented on the friendliness of service, the modern styling and the cleanliness. I emailed the reception with a couple of questions before we arrived, which they answered quickly and helpfully. Check in was quick and seamless, in a really cool and funky brightly decorated reception.

Kyriad Gare Perrache reception

The rooms were well laid out, with The. Most. Comfortable beds and pillows, plenty of plug sockets, well lit mirrors (and a full length one too, amazing how many hotels forget that) and a great shower (one of the first measures of any hotel stay).

Kyriad Gare Perrache hotel bedroom

The rooms were serviced daily with clean towels, renewed coffee, tea and biscuits and everything was immaculately clean. Points lost for the tiny size of the lift (the three of us and our luggage wouldn’t fit, we had to make two journeys) but that’s not the end of the world.

The hotel had a great bar which played contemporary and traditional jazz and again was decorated in a very modern style. Drinks were VERY expensive, but that’s hotel bars for you! We didn’t eat in the restaurant but the food looked really good. Check out the funky piano!

Kyriad Gare Perrache hotel bar

Quality – box ticked.

Finally, the price. I mooched around to get the best deal, settling on Hotels.com and taking advantage of cashback via Quidco. The hotel website price was around 100 euros per night, but I booked it for about £50 per night. I found it cheaper to book a 2 night and 1night separate stay than all 3 nights together (I then just emailed the hotel to ask if I could stay in the same room for the duration of the two stays, which wasn’t a problem). You can read my top tips for booking a bargain trip here.

Price – box ticked!

Booking a hotel is always a risky process, even if you’re only on a short break and will just be using it as a base, because staples like a good shower and comfortable bed are important. But I was thrilled with this hotel and would definitely recommend it.

Only after I booked it did I realise that Kyriad is obviously a chain in France, as I stayed at one in Nice last year.

What are your criteria for booking a hotel?

Thanks, as always, for reading! x

 

A day trip to Annecy

2 Comments

One of the great things I find about French cities is how well connected they are, and how cheap the public transport is. So it made complete sense for us to take advantage of that and plan a daytrip outside of Lyon.

Annecy is a pretty town very near to the Swiss border, in the Alps. The old town has lots of coloured buildings and a river running through it. It’s sometimes referred to as the Venice of the Alps. I’ve seen pictures of it and read about it in the past and, although it’s a 2 hour train journey, the tickets only cost us about £45 return which was well worth it.

If you follow me on instagram you’ll have already seen a lot of these photos, as I was very taken with the place!

Lake Annecy is the biggest lake in Europe, and surrounded by pretty lakeside towns and mountains. We went on a boat trip.

There are flowers everywhere in the town and on the bridges across the river.

This is tartiflette – a speciality of the region. A gratin of potatoes, onions and bacon lardons smothered in baked reblochon cheese. It was pretty spectacular!

Tartiflette

We had a beautiful day in the sunshine, breathing in the mountain air and enjoying life, before getting the train back to Lyon in time for dinner!

Thanks, as always, for reading! x

 

 

Our trip to Lyon – what we did

8 Comments

Lyon is the third biggest city in France, after Paris and Marseilles, according to the commentary on our bus tour of the city. The open top bus, where everyone was crammed downstairs because the weather was so bloody awful…

Thank goodness for overpacking. As I mentioned in my previous post the weather forecast for the first two days was cold and rainy, followed by warmer temperatures and sunshine for the next two. There’s always the hope that the forecasters have got it wrong, and in fact they had, it was colder than suggested!

Our first stop was the Basilica de Notre Dame, situated high on Fourviere Hill on the old town side of the River Saone. We took the (impressively clean and organised) Metro and then the funicular railway to the top of the hill. The Basilica was built between 1872 and 1884 and is one of the most breathtaking churches I’ve ever been in – from sheer scale through to attention to detail.

Inside was mind blowing.

I spent so long looking at the mosaics – each one must have been 3 metres long and was made entirely out of tiny half centimetre squares. The dedication and attention to detail is hard to comprehend.

Mosaic fresco at Basilica de Notre Dame Lyon

On a good day you can see Mont Blanc from Fourviere Hill. On a cold, rainy, windy, 6 degree day, you can’t!

Vieux Lyon, old town, is a maze of cobbled streets and little squares with restaurants and traditional Lyonnais bouchons – tiny eateries serving rustic cuisine from the region. It was very pretty, but hampered by the weather even though we struggled on in the face of adversity!

You can get a perspective of how high the Basilica rises above the city from this picture.

Vieux Lyon with view of Basilica

Parc de la Tête d’Or covers 290 acres. It’s huge! I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a multi faceted park in my life, and we spent 2 hours just wandering around.

It has a lake where people can boat in summertime, a beautiful fountain surrounded by flowers, and there’s a big velodrome in the grounds too!

There’s a small deer park, which randomly also has some ostriches?!

A zoo with flamingos, a giraffe (who we didn’t see, unfortunately), lions (who wouldn’t stand up for a photo!), a variety of monkies who I couldn’t photograph through glass, buffalo, toucans and tortoises! An eclectic mix!

The park is famous for it’s rose gardens, although we were slightly too early as they weren’t fully in flower. I can only imagine what a riot of colour there is in high season.

And the Botanical Gardens which, although not my thing (too claustrophobic) were  very impressive.

There you have it, an overview of our time in Lyon! We didn’t mange to see everything we’d have liked because of the weather, the fact that 1st May is Labour Day and there is no public transport running (WHAT???!!! I didn’t know that when I booked!) and also my Mother-in-Law, who was our travelling companion, isn’t at 100% health right now so we were tourist dawdlers rather than striding out all over the place and walking miles like we usually do.

Special mention, before I finish, to my first time of eating snails! Which I enjoyed so much I had them a second time too! They’re fiddly to get out of the shells and not very filling, but they were so tasty and enjoyable. A similar texture to mussels, they were cooked in garlic butter and I loved them.

Tomorrow I’ll share some pictures from our daytrip to Annecy, in the Alps.

Thanks, as always, for reading!