Our Fall European road trip is coming to a close, but we still have a few more weeks of travel left and a few more places to visit. On this leg, we headed to Lucerne, Switzerland where we walked, hiked, biked and visited museums. The weather is holding, but just barely, as winter is just around the corner. During this leg, it was a bit cooler and a bit wetter, but we are making do.

Lucerne, Switzerland: The drive from Bellinzona started out easy with many tunnels and almost no elevation change. The Swiss are masters of tunnel making which allow vehicles to not have to climb and descend all of frequent mountain passes. This makes for a more enjoyable driving experience, but must help with fuel savings from the vehicles on these highways, too. One of the tunnels was 17 km (10.5 miles) and another was 9 km (5.6 miles) long which are the longest tunnels we have ever experienced. The temperature at the mid-point of the longest tunnel was 34°C (93°F) but 12.5°C (54°F) when we exited. The tunnels are clean, bright and very well maintained and all vehicles seem to maintain a longer gap between each other than usual for safety reasons.

Our arrival in Lucerne was a bit of a shock to our system. This city is crazy busy with tourists and somehow in our research we must have missed that this is the number one most visited place in all of Switzerland. Oops! Gridlock traffic, large groups of people and lots of merchandise being sold on the street abounded. There was even a carnival fair in town adding to the crowds.  Lastly, we noticed that more younger people were smoking cigarettes than we have seen on our travels recently.

When we started traveling in Chickpea, we weren’t sure how well our internet service provider would work for long periods of travel. We have the Unlimited Google Fi plan which provides each of us with 50 GB of high-speed international data each month (after 50 GB it is throttled) and covers almost every country including to our travels in Rwanda, Tanzania, Costa Rica and even Tracey’s recent visit to Patagonia, Argentina. The details of our plan indicate that after 90 days of continuous international use, the plan will be terminated if we don’t return to the US for a bit, so we are mindful of that. Overall, this plan has worked seamlessly for us as we never worry about what country we are in (our phone just magically works wherever we go) and we never even think about our data usage, including streaming movies and video chatting with friends and family back home. Our phones just work like they do back in the US (actually they work better in Europe) and we are even able to use our phones as a mobile hot spot for our laptop and tablet. Bloody brilliant.

We arrived and parked up at a campground located within the city and then immediately jumped on a bus to the city center. We ate lunch at Tidbits, this location being on the top floor of the train station with large windows overlooking the platforms for a good people watching opportunity. Tidbits is a small Swiss chain of vegetarian (with many vegan options) restaurants that provides for a quick, tasty and healthy meal at an affordable (for Switzerland) price. The Lucerne train station is a hub and has a high volume of trains and therefore lots of people coming and going. There was a piano in the Great Hall and passengers would randomly sit down and play a few songs. We listened for a bit and thought some of them were quite good.

Next up was a VoiceMaps GPS audio tour of Old Town. This tour took us to all of the popular sights including Chapel Bridge which was packed with people. We lingered longer in the parts of town that had less people, but overall enjoyed this tour and getting an opportunity to stretch our legs. We jumped on the bus and returned to the campground where we relaxed the rest of the day.

The next day we checked the weather forecast and there was a 0% chance of rain all day but overcast skies. Score! We decided to do a 4.5-mile hike around a local lake. Our campground again provided free public transportation passes, so we hopped on the bus to the trailhead. On the hiking app, the trail looked as if it followed the lake, but when we actually started walking the trail, it was not that simple and had more elevation climbing up and down than advertised. We enjoy walking through neighborhood streets and looking at the architecture and there were many lovely modern houses in this area. We enjoy seeing how people live their everyday lives from recycling to vehicle charging, greenhouse gardening and “green” roofs. This trail was mainly used by local runners and walkers, and we were likely the only tourists, but everyone who passed us, greeted us although sometimes with a greeting or language we were not familiar with so we just smile back and mumble Guten Tag. About 1/3 of the way around the lake it started to drizzle and about 2/3 around the lake the skies opened up and it down poured. As the forecast was for 0% rain, we did not have an umbrella or raincoats with us. We bailed on completing the hike, backtracked to the nearest town and hopped on a bus to the train station for another lunch at Tidbits. It was a good decision as it rained hard for another hour. After returning to the campervan to dry out, the sun reappeared so Tony was able to get in a nice bike ride while Tracey cooked a vegetable curry for dinner.

The next day was Tracey’s Birthday and she wanted to go to the large Swiss Transport Museum which has been called the Smithsonian of Switzerland, but that is probably taking it a bit too far in our opinion. The museum was next to our campground and staying there provided us a discount. The museum has 5 large exhibition halls: cars, planes, boats and subs, trains and space exploration. The museum has a high concentration of hands-on displays, and although probably technically for children, we did a lot of them including: conducting a high speed train in a simulator,  racing each other on hand-powered rail carts, checking our reflexes on a auto braking challenge, competing against each other in a rowing challenge, donning VR headsets and jumping on stationary bikes to experience car vs. bike traffic challenges, but our funniest was strapping ourselves into a Prius and serving as literal crash test dummies mimicking a 10 kph head-on crash. 10 kph does not sound fast, but coming to an abrupt stop was quite a jolt and left Tracey with sternum pain from the seatbelt retraction and Tony with neck pain from the whiplash! This exhibit would NEVER happen in the US, can you imagine the length of the legal disclaimer and waiver which would need to be signed? In Switzerland, we just walked up and they asked if we had a current neck or back problem, and then strapped us in to be crash test dummies. We ended our museum visit, with a 3-D movie in the IMAX of what Future Cities might look like in terms of design and technology. We jumped on the bus again and headed to another (yes, our 3^rd time) lunch at Tidbits. We have stopped even looking at the bus schedules at this point as buses come so frequently (4-8 minutes) it is not even worth trying to time them.  After lunch we had plans to stop at a vegan gelato shop, but they were closed so we walked back to the campground along the lakefront and got home just in time for it to start raining again. Tracey made homemade sweet potato and bean burgers with roasted potatoes for dinner and Tony snuck in another ride on his bike but this time he brought his “ass saver” clip to serve as a rear fender.

We have enjoyed Lucerne in spite of the busyness and number of tourists. The weather was variable, but we worked around the rain and were able to get outside every day for at least ½ the day. Temperatures were a bit cooler and we are now wearing our thin puffy coats.

We have noticed the campgrounds are much busier than we thought they would be at this time of year. We have not had any problems getting a pitch, but many nights the campgrounds are completely full. The same with this campground as we saw the “Full” sign out several days, but the staff were kind and found overflow spots for everybody that arrived after they were full. The campground and our pitch were nothing to write home about, but it was a great location, staff were friendly and they had new showers with extra hot high-pressured water and heated floors.

We planned to leave the next day for Interlaken, but when we woke up we checked the weather forecast which showed the weather was going to be better in Lucerne than Interlaken which had 100% chance of rain the entire day, so we decided to stay an extra day in Lucerne. We went back to the Swiss Transport Museum but only to see another 3-D IMAX movie, this time about Antarctica. It was fantastic and brought back many memories of Tracey’s visit there earlier this year. After the movie, we went to lunch, yep, again and our 4^th trip to the Lucerne train station’s Tidbits. We walked the 2 miles back to our campground and then took a leisurely bike ride on our Brompton’s out to the countryside.

Overall, Lucerne grew on us. This is not a place we would probably re-visit again, but we are glad we visited. Interesting architecture, a connected train network, a beautiful lake surrounded by the snow-capped peaks of the Alps and lots of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure made for a good visit. The weather continues to grow colder day-by-day and the colors on the trees are just starting to show their fall color. We didn’t go to any of the mountains in this area or on any boat rides, but we felt we got an adequate flavor of this city.

Onwards!

Cumulative Wildlife Spotted on this Trip: flamingos, wild boar, jellyfish, deer, swans and storks

Short-List for a Possible Future Move: Geneva, Switzerland; Aix-en-Provence, France; Nice, France, Lugano, Switzerland

Up Next: Interlaken and Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland