Lyon River Cruise: Cruise Day 3

Saturday, May 24: Valrhona Chocolate Factory + Sailing to Avignon

My pre-workout morning walk was on the sundeck of our boat today. When I got up, I realized we were in a lock, and I was able to watch the end of the process as we lowered down and emerged out the other side during my walk. 

I figured out that I could use my personal hotspot (but ran out of data) or laptop VPN to access YouTube. Yay! This made my morning workouts much easier and more varied rather than needing to rely on the music videos on TV and my own yoga routines.

We had a slightly later departure today since we were just walking a short way from the boat dock in Tain l’Hermitage to La Cité du Chocolat, the Valrhona Chocolate Factory, for our morning excursion, so we could have a more leisurely breakfast on board. This time around, passengers were split up into French speakers and English speakers for the factory tour. M and I joined the former group while Mr. E and the rest of his family stayed with the latter group. We had a VERY comprehensive and educational tour of the factory, including information about the origins of chocolate and the multi-step process for refining it and making it into various types of candy confections. We each received a bag of a dozen squares of different types of chocolate at the end of the tour as a souvenir (I left one bag in Evanston and brought the other with us when we returned to Sac).

Mr. E’s mom, aunt, and uncle returned to the boat while Mr. E, M, and I enjoyed some free time walking around Tain l’Hermitage. We stopped into a local store where I did a wine-tasting and bought a bottle of red to bring on board and share with the family later. We also walked across the river and found a great poster for our growing collection. Returning to the boat, we wandered through a farmers market and back across the bridge.

 

The rest of the afternoon was free time on board while traveling a significant distance to Avignon. I set up with my laptop in the Lounge Bar to work on homework for my LTCC Spanish classes for a few hours. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t log onto the Canvas course portal (I had the same problem when we were in Singapore in March), but I could still access the VHL Central site to do the assigned lesson activities and quizzes. And since I had anticipated that Canvas could be a problem, I had already completed and submitted my other required assignments before we left for the trip.

There was time for cocktails and relaxing with the family before dinner and then continuing to sail all night once we went to bed.