Luzern

Again...catching up. All the stuff that follows is from Sunday, January 29 - two weeks ago.

Sundays are good days for road-trips. You might as well drive because there is nothing else to do in the area. Everything in Alsace and Germany shuts down on Sunday. Well, not everything. Tourist spots (museums, landmarks) tend to remain open. But the grocery stores, department stores, and convenience stores are locked tight. Capitalism takes a day off on Sundays.

So, on this particular Sunday Gabi Vega suggested a trip to Luzern, Switzerland. She, and Shirl Simpson (who was visiting from Indy) and Theresa and I loaded up the VW and headed for the Swiss border. Luzern is about 2.5 hours away from Strasbourg by car. You cross the border near the French town of Mulhouse (home of the auto museum) and enter at the Swiss town of Basel.

Do not expect a posting on the town of Basel. Maybe time will prove me wrong, but there doesn't look to be much there for tourists. The drive through Basel (when you're not underground in tunnels) is strangely like driving through the Whiteland - Gary - South Chicago corridor. A blue-collar town.

Luzern, on the other hand, is everything the board of tourism could ask for. It's situated in a valley between the mountains... at the head of a river that empties a crystal clear lake. (Conveniently enough, named Lake Luzern) The architecture of the town is a mix of old and new. Much of the old city wall remains as a reminder of times medieval. In those times, the wall provided protection to the North while the lake/river provided protection to the South. The city has spilled well past the origninal walls with quaint old buildings from the 1700's and 1800's on both sides of the river. The picture below looks to the West, with the old city to the right of the photo.
The day that we went was a bit misty. You could barely make out the Alps in the distance through the haze. From all accounts, Luzern is a more of an attraction for the summertime. Seems that you can take boat cruises to the foot of the mountains and ride cog railways to the top. In January, though, the boat docks are all shut tight and waiting for the Spring. The mountain railways don't open for another 4 or 5 months. Most of the traffic is not tourists coming to Luzern, but rather seems to be the locals returning from ski week-ends from other Alpine areas.

The picture below looks toward the East, toward Lake Luzern. To the right you can see one of the old bridge towers....used to guard the approaches when this was the city's line of defense. Across the bottom of the picture you can see the wooden bridge that joins the two sides of the river.

The wooden bridge marks the center of Luzern's primo tourist area. One can promenade on one side of the river and then head across the covered bridge to do the same on other side. The trip across the bridge also provides a history lesson, thanks to the paintings decorate the way. Theresa really liked these paintings, a sample of which are shown below.

Besides the wooden bridge, the other monument that is most associated with Luzern is "the lion". This is a memorial carved in the side of a limestone cliff. The cliff would have been outside the old city walls, but today is in the center of the city. The lion is depicted as mortally wounded with a spear through his chest. This is a memorial to Swiss military losses from a time when Swiss neutrality was either not yet in existance, or did not do any good.

That's all there is to say about Luzern for this day. Though I do believe that we will go back to Luzern when the weather is warmer.