Notre Aventure Française, 2013: 10th September

We found the railway station in Vienne today and picked up a timetable for possible train excursions to Lyon. Lyon is the second largest city in France after Paris and not somewhere I would want to drive the car. While in Vienne we sourced out another small restaurant which served the menu de jour. These 2, 3 or 4 course meals are value packed for around 13 euros (approx. $17.50) each. The main course on this one was what we think was tripe wrapped in a pancake type pastry and fried. It suited me but not to Ann's taste. I ate hers as well.
We headed home after lunch but stopped at "Le Jardin du Bois-Marquis", a 5.5 hectare garden in the our sister village of Vernioz. The garden consists of 800 deciduous, conifers ( all of which have ceramic name tags ) and some 53,000 different other plants. The texture and colour of the bark on some of the trees we hadn't seen before. It includes a large man made lake which is the home to a large variety of ducks, geese, swans and large carp. Hundreds of green frogs live in the frog pond. The garden is the work of one man who has created it over decades and is now owned by the municipality to which he donated it. He still lives on the property. It will be a picture of colour later in Autumn. We may be lucky to see it later on during our stay here.