Lucerne

On Saturday Patrick and I took advantage of the gorgeous weather (a rarity around here, we've learned) and spent the day in Lucerne! The city is really beautiful, as apparently everyone else in the world already knows, since they were all there to enjoy it with us. The quaintness of the city is brought down a little by the hordes of tour groups and the bus parking lot they've installed in the middle of it all, but hey, who are we to complain? We used Lucerne as a jumping-off point to go into the "pre-Alps" and went up a mountain called Pilatus. It was a great day trip, and only an hour from Basel!

Here's some pictures from downtown Lucerne. We decided the riverfront area is slightly better than Basel's, but only because the river is narrower and there many more bridges spanning it so it's easier to keep going back and forth. Plus, there are cute pedestrian bridges, some of which are made from wood and are centuries old - or, they used to be centuries old, then burned down sometime in the 1990s and got rebuilt in the same style.

This is the view across the lake (the downtown spans the point where the lake narrows into a river):

This is a fun building from the old city:

Patrick with bridges:

Patrick needs more cowbell!

We took a train from Lucerne to the town of Alpnachstadt, which is at the base of Pilatus.

From there we took the steepest cog-wheel railway in the world up the side of the mountain, which took about a half hour and gave us some awesome views.

It was really cloudy when we got to the top, so we couldn't see much.

We went walking around on the hiking trails anyway, because it was still pretty cool to be up there.

I call that one "Window Without a View."

Look at that poor bastard! Hiking up the mountain when there's a perfectly nice railway to take!

All that walking can really get tiring. Good thing there are some handy chairs to nap in.

At the request of my mom, we purchased and ate a candy bar on the top of the mountain in a recreation of her ascent of the same mountain 40 years ago. We made sure to get a Swiss one.

Just as we were about to go back down, the clouds cleared! The view was pretty amazing.

We went down the opposite side of the mountain on a pair of gondolas. The first one was really large and they pack a ton of people into it, so that wasn't so fun.

Then we transfered to a way smaller gondola in this mini town.

We got to travel the rest of the way alone, so that was great.

The gondola left us in a town called Kriens, which is basically a suburb of Lucerne, and we took a bus back to downtown. We walked around some more until we felt like we saw all that the city had to offer and then we hopped a train back to Basel. Overall, we had a great day.