Switzerland 5: Lucerne

 

On May 2, 2023, we awoke at our AirBnB in Alpnach, just a few minutes south of Lucerne, and found that we had a nice view off of our balcony of some pretty green hills dotted with houses.

Mt. Pilatus

Our first destination was Mt. Pilatus, which is southwest of Lucerne. Since the top of the mountain was clouded over, we decided to buy gondola tickets from Kriens to just the first stop along the way. It cost the same to buy the individual legs separately anyway, so then we could see if things cleared up before deciding to go further.

The gondola ride was fun, as always.

The view on the way up was gorgeous.

As we floated along, we could see farms with their farm animals around them.

I was excited to hear the cowbells on the cows. Here's a little video where you can hear the bells as we pass over.

Partway up, we could start to see the town and lake below.

Even further along, the clouds started to obscure the town again.

The first stop was Krienseregg (meaning "a ridge [above] Kriens"). Jared, Katelyn and Mikayla all had nice cameras with them. Jared was using my zoom lens because his got stuck and wouldn't zoom. (When we got home, we found that we just needed to tighten a screw that was hiding under the rubber zoom ring. So yes, Jared had a screw loose.)

There were some pretty forests up there.

We started hiking along the gravel road there, and found a little lookout over one of the meadows.

There was a river that looked like it was made of Pepsi. I think it's the natural nutrients from the forest getting washed down by the rain.

The moss reminded me of Oregon.

It was really squishy in some places. I was glad I chose the waterproof hiking shoes for this trip.

Eventually we got back on the gondolas and rode them up to the next stop, which was Fräkmüntegg.

There were more farms along the way. I assume these places get a lot of snow in the winter.

Here's a 1-minute video of our view from the gondola as we floated over the forest.

From there, the ride up to the peak of Mt. Pilatus would have been a larger, more serious gondola.

We didn't take that leg of the journey, because it cost more and we wouldn't have been able to see anything at that point anyway.

In fact, it didn't entirely look like the other end of the cable was attached to anything(!)

"Foop!"

At Fräkmüntegg, we looked down at the mountain, partially shrouded in clouds.

There was a toboggan ride there, where you sit on a wheeled sled and zoom down a metal slide, with a handle to control your speed.

Here's a four-minute video, showing the girls heading off on the toboggans, and then my ride, with a couple little surprises along the way. It ends with a time lapse of the ride back up, with a little traditional Swiss music to keep you company.

Sienna fell off partway down, and her phone flew out of her pocket. She didn't know if it was safe to go back and get it, so she just kept going. For those who watched the video, you could see that we all passed over it. So when I got to the top, the guy let me go down again to grab it, which I did. It had unfortunately been hit by at least one toboggan, so the glass on the back was broken, but fortunately the front and cameras were ok, and the phone still worked fine. So it will last her fine until her mission at the end of July. (We imagined a conversation like, "What happened to your phone?" "Oh, it got run over by a toboggan in Switzerland.")

After the toboggan rides, we were pretty hungry, so we got some pizza at the little booth there. It was made from frozen pizzas, but we really enjoyed it.

And, as I always say, all's well that ends with ice cream.

Sienna and I posed like the papa bear & baby bear carving. (Oh, and hi, Jared!)

The clouds cleared out enough that we could start to see Lake Lucerne down below.

Instead of paying for the return ride, we decided to go on a bit of a hike back down the hill to where our first gondola stopped. There is a zip line course up there, so Sienna just walked out to one of the platforms for fun.

Above, gondolas continued to disappear into the mist.

Eventually, the clouds cleared enough that we could see up the mountain. (The zoom pictures are from Jared. I left my Nikon in Geneva, since I knew I'd be lending my lens to Jared. I was actually happy not to carry the big camera around, and I knew the kids would have us covered on any zoom shots we needed).

We hiked down some trails and along some roads.

Even when we were on the road, the views were great. 

I especially loved the mossy forests that we walked by.

Sometimes we ventured into the forest, with its squishy moss.

(Jared captured this one nicely).

Eventually we came to a place where we got off of the road and onto a trail.

Katelyn collected some wildflowers.

And the kids all "frolicked" in the fields, while Linette sang "The hills are alive with the sound of music...."

The clouds finally cleared out enough that we could see the tops of the mountains.

When we got back down to the tram station where we first got dropped off, there was a little playground there. 

Here's a little video of Katelyn going on the zip line.

This playground had one of the nicer views in the world.

Finally, we were back on the gondola on the way back down the mountain.

We heard bells on the goats on the way back down. ("goatbells?")

Here's a 30-second time lapse video of going back down the mountain. (It splices several sections together, since the button kept getting pushed on the way down).

Our jaunt halfway up Mt. Pilatus was a fun adventure.

Lucerne

With some effort, we found a parking garage in Lucerne. The thing was, there was no room to open the doors on either side, so I had to climb out the trunk.

Here's a 20-second video clip if you want to see me squirm out of the car while everyone laughs.

Our first stop was a Jesuit church, built in the 1600s.

I loved the ornate woodwork there.

In one room was a case with the remains of "St. Coelestini Martyris" (which seems to mean "celestial martyr.").

Here is the church from the back. From there, we walked into another building in the same cluster.

This chapel had beautiful paintings all around it.

We walked across the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke), which is the oldest covered bridge in Europe. It was originally built about 1365.

The iconic Wasserturm ("Water Tower", meaning "tower in the water", not "tower holding water) was built 30 years before the bridge was. Over the years it has been used as a prison, torture chamber, municipal archive and local treasury.

It has paintings on the triangular trusses that depict the history of Lucerne. They were painted in the 1600s by a Catholic painter Hans Heinrich Wägmann. There were originally 158 paintings, 147 of which still existed in 1993 before a fire destroyed all but about 30 of them. The bridge was restored after that fire.

The bridge is 204 meters (672 feet) long.

My grandpa Malcolm Hendricks Merrill traveled all over the world in his work in public health with the World Health Organization. He often went to the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and apparently made it to Lucerne on at least one occasion. Here is a picture of the bridge that he took in May, 1971. (This would have been before the 1993 fire and subsequent restoration).

After crossing the bridge, we saw this building with fun decorations painted all over.

Now that we were in Switzerland, meals were pretty expensive, but for some reason the Indian restaurant we found was both tasty and reasonable.

After dinner, we walked over to the old city wall (called the Museggmauer, where "Musegg" is this area in the heart of Lucerne, and "mauer" means "wall"). It still has a series of nine towers. 

Here you can see Mikayla in the arch, Linette at the door that goes up the stairs, and Sienna photobombing from a couple of steps up. You can tell from the diagonal ceiling how steep the stairs were.

There were indeed a lot of stairs involved.

From the first tower we climbed, we could see a couple of the other towers and part of the old wall.

Here's Sienna enjoying the view.

It was indeed a nice view, with churches in the foreground and Lake Lucerne and the Swiss Alps in the background.

Then we made our way over to each of the other towers.

Jared and Katelyn tried to use the stairs that go nowhere.

As we walked along the wall between the towers, there was a soccer game going on down below.

Now that the clouds had dissipated, we had a good, clear view of Mt. Pilatus, towering over Lucerne.

One of the towers was the Clock Tower. It had a bunch of clockworks inside, several of which had pendulums which allowed them to operate and keep time.

The towers supposedly closed at 7pm, but nobody locked them up, so we kept checking things out for a few more minutes.

Sienna and I were ahead of the rest of the group, so they took a picture of us way up in the tower.

Then we took a picture of everyone else way down on the wall.

We could see sailboats on the lake in the distance.

Here's what the clock tower looked like from in front. There was a pendulum inside that was about 4 stories long that kept the time on this clock. When Sienna and I were in the next tower over, we heard the bell ring. The rest of our group was in there at the time, and they said that was indeed very loud and surprising when that happened.

Here is a short video showing the 3-story pendulum that powers the main clock on the clock tower, along with some other gears going inside, and some bells ringing across the town at 7pm.

Sienna found a cool rocky place.

We got someone to take our picture in front of the purple flowers with bits of the old wall in the background.

While we were walking around Lucerne that evening, Kelsi gave us a call. It was six hours earlier in North Carolina.

The Chapel Bridge looked cool in the evening. The moon was a nice touch.

The Jesuit church we visited looked awesome from across the river.

Jared zoomed way in on the moon above the tip of the church for this shot of the moon.

I had heard there were colorful buildings in a plaza called the Weinmarkt, so we checked it out.

Whenever we walked within sight of the Chapel Bridge, we couldn't help but take more pictures, especially with the sunset lending some pink to the clouds.

The Jesuit church looked nice in the evening light as well.

I loved the building with the red lines everywhere

I was desperately trying to find gelato somewhere. I finally found a place with a nice-looking selection, but alas, it was closed. That seemed really sad.

But finally, against all odds, I found one more place that was open. Yay!

At one point, the river was sort of split into two, and half of it ran down a drop that made the water a bit violent there.

Jared did a long exposure to show the water's progress down several dips.

This building seemed especially Swiss.

Our last stop in Lucerne was the other famous covered bridge, the Spruer Bridge (Spreuerbrücke), which you can see here in two sections (with the old city wall and a tower in the distance). This covered bridge was built in the 1200s, destroyed in a flood in 1566, and then rebuilt.

Inside, there is a series of triangular paintings, created from 1616 to 1637. They form a "Dance of Death" (Danse Macabre or Totentanz in German), with creepy skeletons in most of them.

It was a cool old bridge.

On one side there was a view of an even more violent waterway. The thick, clear, curved slab of water was impressive.

This shop looked like a small castle.

Finally, I climbed my way back into the car, backed out, loaded everyone up, and we headed to our AirBnB again. Out the window of our AirBnB, I was able to get a close-up of this beauty. (Larinioides sclopetarius, or "bridge spider", it turns out. They don't bite people often, and then it's not bad).

That night we played a game of Skull King, and I think Sienna hosed Linette in one round.

Linette went jogging the next morning, and couldn't have asked for a more beautiful place for it.

She even got to see some sheep with jingling bells.

While Linette was jogging, I drove Mikayla to the train station in Lucerne. Unlike the rest of the kids, she was taking classes in Spring term, and needed to get home. She caught her train to Zurich, and flew home just fine.

On my way back to the AirBnB, I stopped to look at this church, which had an especially tall spire.

It also had creepy dragon gargoyles in the corners.

Once everyone was up, we checked out of our AirBnB and started driving towards Interlaken.

In the next episode, we check into our AirBnB near Interlaken, and then head immediately up to Lauterbrunnen, with its amazing waterfalls and ridiculous cliffs.