The design capital of France truly disappointed us. Ever since we drove through the central Saint-Étienne a couple of years ago, and got somewhat lost there, I have wanted to visit the city with more time. The city was filthy, filthier than the capital, if it even is possible: there was trash on the streets and sidewalks, dog poop everywhere, and urine smell was omnipresent. Someone living in the apartment building in which our Airbnb apartment was located had a habit of throwing cigarette butts out of their window. Well, our apartment wasn’t any better, especially the kitchen: the surfaces were sticky, there were unwashed cookware thrown in the drawers, but the worst of all was the foul greasy smell that we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I am not a huge fan of air fresheners, but now we had to get a lavender scented Glade to at least mask the foul odor so that we could cook.
The city wasn’t particularly exciting either. The most interesting characteristic was how hilly it was, and how steep the streets were. That’s one of the reasons why our first day’s morning long run turned into a run/walk/hike, first to the Parc Joseph Sanguedolce, and then to the nearby slopes.
Before transitioning into a design city Saint-Étienne was a coal mining center, and known for manufacturing weapons, bicycles, and ribbons. And that’s what the permanent exhibitions in the Museum of Art and Industry are about: weapons, bicycles and ribbons, only that the ribbon exhibit was closed and under renovation when we visited. The weapon exhibit wasn’t too interesting to either of us: it had tens and tens of firearms, some swords, and armours and harnesses, mostly from the previous centuries. But the bicycle exhibit was awesome: it covered most of the modern bike types from race bikes to tour bikes, but also older cycles we didn’t even know had existed, like a tricycle with a huge left wheel and two smaller right wheels, or bicycles with multiple chains. The bamboo bikes were the coolest.
After the museum visit we strolled around downtown before a thunderstorm drove us back to the stinky apartment.
Our second day in Saint-Étienne took us to a hike above the Loire river and the artificial lake of Grangent. During the first part of the hike we had spectacular views to the gorge of Loire and the lake. The second part traveled deep in the forest. It is amazing how this section of Loire is so different from the river we followed a couple of years ago on our La Loire à Velo tour from Nevers to the Atlantic — North and West from here. That part of Loire was not dammed, and was very shallow with barely no water in it.
Since this was a relative short (and very easy) hike (only 5K), we had planned another hike for the afternoon. However, when approaching the trailhead a heavy thunderstorm swept over us, so we decided to return to the apartment and consider our options from there. We didn’t want to go very far, so we just drove up to a hill in city’s vicinity, Parc de Montaud, and did a short hike there on ‘parcour sportif.’ There was nothing much to see in the park, besides an analemmmatic sundial and an educational structure (“six suns”) to study the Sun’s positions during the two solstices and equinoxes. Given that quite a heavy downpour had passed the town the evening before, the vegetation in the park, especially the grass, was alarmingly dry.
One more view to Lac de Grangent, the Château de Grangent on its small island, and the Dam of Grangent behind it.
