Switzerland 9 - Luzern

Another day, another early morning. Like most our vacations, I'm going to need another vacation to recover.  We found a high-speed train from Bern to Luzern, and arrived around 10 am.  We made our way to our air-BNB as slowly as we making sure we'd arrive after bag-drop o'clock, and (after a half-dozen calls on the intercom and two passersby trying to give us advice) we finally dropped off our bags and set off across our city. 

<Editors note: The spelling is Lucerne in French and Luzern in German, so I'm going to mix and match capriciously) 

As a carpenter: Damn. 

Our Air-bnb is right on the river near the edge of the lake, meaning we're dead-center of old-town. Lucerne is famous for it's two covered bridges, all classical woodworking (so much so that one of them almost burned down in the 90s) so of course we had to stroll across them, weaving our way down the river. The first is Kapellbrücke (Chappel-Bridge), a beautiful bridge cutting diagonally across the river, decorated with flowers and paintings from the history of the town (including one showing a giant, based on some fossilized mammoth bones they found), and featuring an old prison in the center. It is absurdly picturesque and essentially a historical insta-trap. And boy has instagram embraced it -  we witnessed probably a dozen tiktoks and nigh 100 photoshoots. Not that I didn't take tons of pictures, but I didn't ask anyone to strike a dozen poses while gazing ponderously into the distance and blocking the entire bridge.... 

We cut into <Jesuitenkirche> once across the river, and it was a beautiful Jesuit basilica that absolutely was the caliber of the romans, however they were mid-service so we politely and respectfully loitered in the back instead of walking through the whole thing.  The second bridge of the day is Rathausteg , which is much like the first, only shorter (as it's not diagonal, thanks Pythagoras!) and it featured scenes of Death, dancing and posing with all classes of society. Very memento mori. Just upriver, practically adjacent to  the bridge, is the city dam. This limits the outflow from Lake XXXXX <Lucerne. Turns out the town is named after the lake, and I'm not at all observant>, keeping it at a navigable river throughout the seasons, and is primarily controlled with hundreds of wooden planks that are added and removed throughout the seasons. The fine-tuning of the waterlevel is done via the hydro turbines, which generate power for the town while giving the entire bridge a subtle hum.

We then cut inland to see the old market districts. Murals of Fasnacht for the holiday shops, cupids' bearing diamond rings in the jewelry district... you get the gist. We stopped for lunch at a bakery, and then cut over to the shore of the lake itself. Great views of the lake and across into hazy mountains, and a lot of good people-watching and car-watching <more Porsche's than American cars (which were only muscle cars) >. At this point we were all pretty tired, Sage most of all, so we headed back to our apartment where we finally checked in and caught a nap. I even grabbed a few minutes, fading out to the white noise of the happy-hour crowd (they start early) a few floors beneath us. 

Once we were all suitably recovered, it was time to do the city walls! A long walk uphill, followed by flights and flights of stairs, but our naps had revived us, so it wasn't that bad. The city walls were excellent, consisting of 9 towers and 8 spans  The first two towers were closed, but we climbed the third for great views of the lake, and were rewarded with a penny smasher! Total surprise but I've had backup coins ready all week... we crossed across the wall to the fourth tower, which I climbed  to watch the weights, pendulum, and escapement for the giant clock within. The views were terrible, but the engineer in me was satiated. Tower 5 required us to descend the ground, where we walked to tower 7. A long climb from the ground to the tip rewarded us with an open courtyard with great views of the wall itself and the river below us. My parents stayed with Sage at the bottom... I threw a coin at them, which Sage immediately pointed towards, but my parents had eyes only for her and were totally oblivious.   The final two towers were closed, so we headed back to the river to recross the beautiful bridges in a mission to find dinner.

This was almost such a cute picture,
but Sage tried a sudden dive.
As she does.

Cutting through a dozen more amateur photoshoots, we made our way to The Raufhaus for dinner.  The food was slow (but good), the beer was great, and we ended up at a shared table where we talked to two shifts of tourists from Atlanta. On our way back, we had to stop for gelato (of course), and witnessed even more photoshoots while in line. Overall, a gorgeous historic district, mercifully compact on our worn-out legs (only 14000 steps today), and an ideally located apartment. Even if the floors are askew by 1-2 degrees (we measured) the view is incredible, and I can listen to live violin music as I pick out today's pictures.

The view from our room!