The celebrity status of its local chefs is testament to the fact that Lyon is known as the food capital of France. We opted to eat onboard so have no testimonial to support that claim, but the 22 Michelin starred restaurants in the city should suffice. These starred establishments are in total contrast to the 20 restaurants certified as les bouchons where the least expensive, least marketable animal parts are cooked in traditional ways and served to the courageous. Think pig brain dressed in vinaigrette, tripe in all its glorious forms, salad dressing made with pork lard.

Fine silk is another of Lyon’s claims to fame. By the 19th century it was the top French export industry outperforming all other silk industries in Europe thanks to the political support it had enjoyed going as far back as the 15th century. At its height there were 90,000 weavers here. I learned about what remains of the silk business in Lyon at a lecture given by a family-owned workshop that still uses old school silk screens for part of its production. We learned that chiffon, twill, and satin are weaves commonly used with silk. The most fascinating process as far as I am concerned is hand-painting velvet on chiffon. The final product, a gorgeous scarf, almost looked too delicate to use. No surprise, digital designing and printing have opened the door to faster production, greater detail, and the ability to use more colors. Count yourselves among the few to know that Queen Victoria’s wedding dress was made of silk woven here and our White House has walls covered in silk from Lyon!

A unique feature of this nine arrondissements city are its traboules, 400 hidden passageways and tunnels through buildings and courtyards. Used by busy merchants in medieval days, they connected small weaving studios with the Saône River and served as strongholds for silk workers protesting their poor working conditions. As late at WWII they were used for relaying secret messages.

We got oriented with a city tour that included strolling the cobbled streets of Old Town (Vieux Lyon) easily identified by its red roofs. The relatively new (1896) Basilica of Notre Dame, at the top of Fourvière Hill, gave us sweeping views of Vieux Lyon, said roofs, and the narrow peninsula of land at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône known as Presqu’île, a shopping district. We drove past the Gothic St. Jean Cathedral, the Palace of Justice, a gigantic city-block-long former indigent children’s hospital that is now a four-star hotel, and Roman ruins testifying to the fact that Lyon was the third most influential city in the empire, after Rome and Alexandria, Egypt. The highlight for me was exploring two traboules.

Thanks to the Romans’ fondness for wine there are currently more than 2,000 estates, 9 cooperatives, and 200 merchants in a region that starts just north of Lyon. This region specializes in the annual production and sale of 70,000 bottles of Beaujolais. The highway, an old Roman road, took us to a small vineyard for a tasting and a short tutorial about the 12 geographic zones (appellations) in this region, each producing a Beaujolais with a distinctive flavor profile. The grapes, mostly gamay, are hand harvested by migrant workers from all over Europe. Sheep are used as lawn mowers here too.

Dan took a tour of the medieval stone village of Pérouges, setting of films such as The Three Musketeers, this afternoon while the vessel moseyed on downriver. This fortified town is perched on a hill, per Dan, and seems to have been carved from the earth upon a bedrock of boulders and stones. He explored the town and learned about the farmers and linen weavers of the 13th-century. He loved sampling galette Pérougienne, a sweet pastry. From his pictures I think I might have made a mistake not going along.

While Dan was touring I enjoyed the leisurely ride downstream and a lecture on the resistance movement in Lyon titled The Army of Shadows. Lyon was the headquarters of the French resistance movement during WWII, hence the appropriateness of the topic. Our speaker began by explaining the three types of units that operated formally: networks took their orders from London, movements operated independently within cities, and a maquis operated in the countryside. The resistance was in its infancy three months into the occupation by German forces but not fully functioning for a year and a half. Current estimates indicate that 300,000 French men and women participated formally and countless others participated in small, defiant, risky acts when opportunities unexpectedly presented themselves. It is estimated that 20 percent of the formal participants, about 60,000, were deported. Half of their number died or were murdered in captivity.

Our speaker did a great job of weaving together the power and influence of a number of seemingly random things: art, French collaborators, Werner Knab, individual acts of defiance, Lyon’s size and location, strikes and protests, the Butcher of Lyon (Klaus Barbie), communication, blending in, Philippe Pétain, and the massive sigh of relief and blossoming of hope when the Allies landed on the French beaches of the Mediterranean August 15, 1944 beginning Operation Dragoon.

Our weather has been ideal with a high yesterday of 75! It was a treat to enjoy the sun from the top deck. We are the envy of cruisers who went south to north two weeks ago. Seems the water was so high in Avignon that their vessel got stuck (couldn’t go under the requisite bridges) in town for three days. They sailed for something like one day and were then relocated to a hotel and bused from place to place for the rest of the ‘cruise.’ We are the lucky ones!