Taking a Hike

What's the farthest (physically and psychologically) you can get from downtown Lyon using only a metro/bus pass? It's a question I've been exploring on weekends when the weather's nice, loading up my daypack with a topo map, the aforementioned TCL pass, and the ubiquitous bread and cheese, and heading out to the western reaches of l'agglomeration (a.k.a. "the glom"*).

Herewith a few photos from one of those trips, out to Sainte-Concorce and Marcy-L'Etoile.

Top photo: vintage plaque across from the Marcy-L'Etoile town hall, helpfully listing altitude, longitude and latitude, and detailing distances (down to the meter) to nearby towns.

Next: quiet fields, both mown [photo 2] and unmown [3]. Yes, I did do the Russell-Crowe-in-Gladiator bit in the wheat field.

I met some friendly horses [4]. One of them [5] spoke English.

Later I stumbled upon this crumbling Romanesque church in a small hamlet. Middle of nowhere, really; just after taking this picture [6] I had to scramble up a bank to get out of the way of an approaching tractor.







*I may in fact be the only person in the world who calls it "the glom".