I’m back with another edition of the “How I Made It” series for paid subscribers, with behind the scenes stories for you on the making of the latest Photowalks episode, this week, from Lyon, France.
First, know that while Europe is currently experiencing a heatwave (high 80s and 90 degrees in Lyon this week), it’s not always that way. We shot the episode in the beginning of May, when the temps were in the high 60s, and in fact it rained for a good deal of time we were there. The heatwave will subside!
Lyon is France’s third-largest city, after Paris and Marseille, but the coolest part of town, Old Lyon, feels like a tiny medieval town, as it should, since the streets are over 2,000 years old.
A visit to Lyon, which calls itself the gastronomic capital of the country, takes about 2 hours from Paris on a high speed train, and as expected, food and history take center stage here.
The two highlights are the weekend food market, which has many fruits and vegetables you’ve probably never seen before, all locally grown, along with flowers, fresh chickens and the like.
It’s because of the access to so much great locally produced food, that many chefs put Lyon on the map. People come to Lyon to visit the Bouchons, the family style restaurants with many courses.
I’m there for the great architecture and back streets, but that’s another story.
The episode that just launched has its roots in the year 2022. That’s when we first visited Lyon, a city my wife Ruth put on our to-do list after a visit to Paris that ended in Avignon. Lyon was on the train trail, so we spent a few days there, and I made a short 12 minute Photowalks video, which I posted on YouTube.
Cut to 2024, when the show expanded to a 22-minute TV show for Scripps News.
I spent the first months of the Scripps arrangement mining my library to come up with full-length expanded versions of previous shows, as they had ordered 30 episodes, and it’s not like I could go out every weekend traveling to come up with new material. So what to do?
