Lions and cultural overload! Lucerne exploration!

It’s cold, not dark and raining again 😉 It is night now though,..so Greg and I have just cooked (gasp) and eaten dinner and are munching on strawberries and nerding out. While having the kindle and the laptop on holiday is great, it does mean you have to share!

We had a rather slow action day yesterday. It was a thrilling near two hours we spent at the train station booking up the rest of our Eurorail trips for the next few weeks. We had a really great lady behind the counter and she managed to find us some seats to get to Paris. The leg between Venice and Milan was booked out, but we are doing some crazy back and forth thing to get there. It works out the same amount of time anyway 😉 It is good it is done though, as we managed to plan to travel on not one, but two public holidays in the next few weeks!

We got to Lucerne with no trouble, the train was only about forty minutes. It was sunshiney, pleasant and very pretty scenery. We had a little trouble getting to our hostel..the bus that supposedly went right by the place did something crazy and we ended up back at the train station and walking there. If we’d asked someone to start with, we would have walked! But, oh well.

Hof Church

We had a stroll about town in the afternoon, found the lion monument and walked along Lake Lucerne for a bit, then doubled back around. We also found quite a few tour groups! Ack! Out and about later on that evening, we walked along the Chapel Bridge. It’s an old wooden bridge which has some paintings in the undercroft. Only some of them are there now, as there was a fire on the bridge in the 1990’s.

Chapel Bridge

Poor Lion! This monument has some grim history!

Lucerne seems a bit busier to me, less relaxed then Zurich, don’t ask me why 😉 Overall people are reasonably friendly and the cities are both very nice. Your eyes will bulge at some of the prices though! Garvey would have a grumble at the 2.50 franc cost for a glass of tap water  😉 Is the rest of Europe the same? I guess we will find out!

Today we got going very slowly….sleeping seems so good after all the terrible flights we just had 😉 We went back towards the Lion Monument, as right next to it is the Glacier Garden. Greg described it as an odd place, as it had such an eclectic mix of features, which it was indeed. It had the glacial potholes, plus a host of other things. There was a glacier museum – covering the basics of ice and glacier formation, a trip through evolution and the time of the woolly mammoth. The place very kindly provided a photo opportunity to whisk you back to the caveman days.

As far as awkward family photos go, this is a high contender!

There was a lot of local Lucerne history, relief models of the Alps, the town a few hundred years ago and things like that.  You could walk up through some pretty gardens and climb a lookout tower, which was cool. By far the most fun in the place was the Hall of Mirrors – I’d never been in anything like it before. Managed not to smack into any mirrors, though I can’t say the same for any of the kids that were in there at the same time as us 🙂

This afternoon we strolled right down the lake towards another museum, the Transport Museum. This was a mistake! Too many cultural things in one day! It was a huge place, a bit sci-techy – you could spend a whole day there! It had lots of old locomotives, boats, cars and planes. Boy paradise. We pushed through the cultural fatigue and tried to get our francs worth! The train history section was probably the most interesting – according to Greg 😉

I’ve no idea why this man was riding around in a skin tight blue suit….!

While we are on mysteries … the 1/2 franc, such a teeny half dollar!

We’re snuggled up for the night now and tomorrow will try to get up to  a mountain, it’s just not highly reccomended in the rainy weather…so we shall see!