Lovely Luzern (or Lucerne)

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Geo: 47.0457, 8.30824

We left Sunday morning and headed out to Luzern. It is only about 50 miles from Zurich. We got here in about an hour. We had a last second e-mail from a place we had hoped to get a room and they had one. We drove there and arrived about 11:30AM. We went in to tell them that we would come by later to check in, but the room was ready. We took in our luggage and found the place to be very quaint. It is more like a B&B than a hotel.
We walked to downtown, crossed the old bridges, and looked for a laundry that the person at the B&B told us about. Since it was Sunday, it was closed, but it was not a coin op laundry. We have just enough clean clothes to get us to Interlaken. The place we reserved online in Interlaken is supposed to have coin op laundry at the hotel.
There is a castle wall and 6 towers up on the hill surrounding the town. We hiked up there and I climbed the stairs to the top of the tallest tower. My legs were like rubber by the time I got back to the bottom. We then walked back to our Pension and took a nicely deserved nap! We got up later and took the bus back downtown and had a nice dinner.
The next morning was sunny, but cool, 47 degrees. By the time we were ready to leave for the day, it had climbed to 57 degrees. We hiked up to a place where a 30 foot long lion was carved into the limestone hillside to celebrate the Swiss Guard for protecting Marie Antoinette in the mid 1700's. The park was full of bus tourists when we got there, but after ten minutes everyone left and we had the place all to ourselves. What luck! After that we walked back down and went to the Swiss Museum of Transportation. It is supposed to be one of the best museums in all of Switzerland. It was really great. It had alot of hands on stuff to play with. We had a quick lunch there and then walked over to the boat dock and got on one of the boats that goes around to all of the villages on Lake Luzern. We cruised along for an hour and a half, sitting in the sun and looking at the villages, mansions and mountains around the lake. It was very relaxing. Then back into town for another fabulous dinner.
Tomorrow we head for Interlaken and the Berner Oberland, which according to Rick Steves, is the best of all places in Switzerland to stay. We will be staying for 5 nights.

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