Lyon as a Base: 2 Day Trip Plan
Two days, two day trips, nothing wasted retreading the city itself. Day 1 is Vienne, a 30 minute train ride to some of the best-preserved Roman ruins in France. Day 2 is the Beaujolais vineyards, best handled by car or a small-group tour since public buses barely reach the villages that matter. Staying longer, see the 3 day , 4 day or 7 day version of this plan, each one this same spine with another day trip added on top.
Book these before you go
- Reserve the Beaujolais tour ahead, small-group departures sell out fastest in tasting season and around Beaujolais Nouveau week. Book the wine tour
- Lock in a Presqu’ile or Vieux Lyon hotel early since you need same-city access to both train stations. Check rates on Booking.com
| Day | Day trip | Distance/time from Lyon | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Vienne | About 30 min by TER | Roman ruins, half day |
| Day 2 | Beaujolais + Pierres Dorees | About 30-45 min by car or tour | Wine country, full day |
Day 1: Vienne
Take the TER from either Part-Dieu or Perrache, both run frequent direct services in about 30 minutes, so there is no real reason to leave before mid-morning. Start at the Ancient Theatre, a Roman amphitheater built around 40 CE that still seats 13,000 people for concerts and the summer Jazz a Vienne festival if your dates happen to overlap with it. From there it is a short walk to the Temple of Augustus and Livia, a remarkably intact temple dating to around 10 BC, standing in the middle of the modern town rather than fenced off in a ruin park, which is part of what makes Vienne feel different from a typical archaeological site.
If Roman history is genuinely your interest rather than a box to tick, the Gallo-Roman Museum nearby fills in context the open-air sites skip, and crossing the river to the Saint-Romain-en-Gal archaeological site adds another hour or two of mosaics and excavated villa foundations. Check current hours on vienne-condrieu.com before you commit to the extra stop, since it is easy to underestimate how much a full circuit takes. Lunch is easy to find near the theatre; this is a working town, not a tourist set piece, so a simple cafe does the job better than hunting for something photogenic.
Treat the whole outing as a half day. Even with the museum and the river crossing, you should be back on a train by mid-afternoon, which leaves the rest of the day free in Lyon to rest before tomorrow’s longer, more demanding outing. Do not schedule anything else for the evening beyond a normal dinner; Vienne is deliberately the light day in this plan.
Day 2: Beaujolais and the Pierres Dorees
A tour or a rental car matters more here than it did for Vienne, since public transport thins out fast once you leave the main rail line into villages like Fleurie, Morgon and Julienas. These are the names actually worth knowing, not just “Beaujolais” as a vague regional label, and none of them are realistically reachable by bus on a one-day timeline. A half-day small-group tour typically covers two to four domaines with tastings of Gamay-based reds, and usually folds in a stop in the golden-stone Pierres Dorees villages, a cluster of roughly 40 hillside hamlets built from a local iron-rich limestone that oxidizes to a rust-gold color. Oingt, the best known of them, is ranked one of France’s Most Beautiful Villages and the wider Pierres Dorees landscape carries UNESCO Global Geopark status.
Do not try to improvise this on public transit. The villages that make Beaujolais worth the trip are exactly the ones the regional bus network skips, and a rental car without local knowledge of which domaines actually welcome walk-ins can turn into a day of driving past locked gates. A tour handles both problems at once and means nobody has to be the designated driver after four tastings. If your dates land on the third Thursday of November, 19 November 2026, Beaujolais Nouveau day turns both Lyon and the villages into a genuine local celebration rather than a marketing stunt, though book well ahead since it is also the single busiest week of the year for both wine and hotel prices.
Why only two day trips, not the city too?
Two days is not enough time to do Vieux Lyon justice and get real value out of day trips, so this plan picks a lane rather than trying to split the difference. If the traboules and bouchons matter more to you on a short trip than Roman ruins and vineyards, use the 2 day Lyon itinerary instead and save the day trips in this plan for a longer return visit.
Is Beaujolais doable without a car?
Not comfortably. The rail network reaches the edge of Beaujolais but stops well short of the wine villages themselves, so a car or an organized tour is the only realistic way to visit more than one domaine in a day. Booking a small-group tour also means someone else handles the driving after several tastings, which matters more in practice than it sounds on paper.
Buy the Vienne TER ticket the evening before on sncf-connect.com rather than same-day. Sunday services run lighter than weekday ones, and getting stuck waiting for the next connection back into Lyon eats directly into the wine day you actually came here for.