We spent the night just outside of Bourges, but since we got there in the dark, we were up at the crack of dawn to do some sight seeing.

We only had a couple of sites on our short list, the first being the Cathedrale St-Etienne (St Stephen’s Cathedral) is one of the largest most impressive gothic churches in France and is UNESCO listed.  The morning sunlight played on the outside of the cathedral and it was absolutely beautiful. The church gardens were incredible and overall the architecture was mind blowing.

After consulting the map we determined we could walk a loop around the town without too much trouble. The town is rich in history, with many old buildings and cobbled stone roads however there are a number of new modern buildings here and there.

The town was really quite pretty, with lots of gardens and quaint ‘arty’ shops, it would have been easy to spend the entire day window shopping 🙂

On our way through the town we came across the Palais Jacques-Coeur, an impressive residence built by a prominent and well known businessman in Bourges.

Our next destination was Lyon, a four hour drive from Bourges not considering any breaks.We decided to break up the trip with a brief stop in Moulins. It was not a town we had done any research on, however we immediately stumbled across the Moulins Cathedral.

We decided to pop inside for a quick look and were really surprised. Whilst it was very statuesque from the outside we had not expected such a grand interior. The Cathedral has been well maintained, given that it was built in the 15th century.

We made the decision to keep driving through Moulins and head on to Lyon, however, we didn’t get very far, because the Cathedral was so big we hadn’t spotted markets that were taking place on the other side 🙂 Quickly finding another parking spot we continued to explore, giving in to temptation we grabbed a coffee and some scones and enjoyed people watching for a bit.

    Eventually we continued on our way and once in Lyon met up with our airbnb host. We had two nights in Lyon and decided to catch up on washing and have a relaxing evening by going out for dinner – Japanese in France 🙂

After reviewing our busy itinerary for the next day and familiarising ourselves with the public transport we called it a night.