Canton: Lucerne / Luzern

Destination: Lucerne / Luzern

Special guest: Wendy Noller from Hey Mamalaide!

Interesting thing: Lucerne is Switzerland’s 7th largest city and Lake Lucerne gets the highest number of boat passengers per year (2.46 million) out of all the lakes in the country including Lake Geneva*.

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I guess I’ve been to Lucerne about a dozen times already in the past four years. That’s many visits to the brilliant Verkehrshaus Swiss Transport Museum and includes passing through several times this year even (it’s a gateway city to a lot of mountains, eg: Stans in Nidwalden). It’s also where I did a very cool nuclear bunker tour of the Sonnenberg tunnel around this time last year, which I thought I’d written about but looks like not. Damn! That was fascinating, must tell you about it sometime.

Another cool thing about the trip to Lucerne via train is you get the familienwagen (family carriage) – for those who don’t know – it’s a playground on the train. The first time we encountered this we really thought we’d stepped into some alternate-reality amazing-world of family friendly public transport. Nowadays, I’m still impressed, although it was a relief to be travelling sans kinder and avoid the squeals and kiddy-fug that’s the inevitable downside of the familienwagen.

As well as venturing out alone, my Luzern trip was my first nighttime canton visit of the series. Alone! At night! Doesn’t happen very often these days.

I went to hang with friend and fellow blogger Wendy from Hey Mamalaide. Luzern was looking very festive and Christmassy and we had planned to go ice skating… But since we’re both Aussies and therefore not particularly competent at cold-weather sportings (that’s our story anyway!) we decided to stick with what we do best: drinking, eating and a good old chinwag.

Before we met up, I did take a short detour to the Weihnachsthotel to take a look (thanks again Tamara, part-time working hockey mum for the tip!). It was lit up like, well, Christmas, and looking pretty fab on a dark and frosty evening. I may have had a moment’s pang that I didn’t book us a table in the Rigi Hütte fondue restaurant there for dinner. No matter.

Wendy took me to Karel Korner, pretty much the perfect Wednesday night cocktail bar. Then we ate dinner at Jeff’s, which I can confidently say is the best (only) burger I’ve ever eaten in Luzern. (I’ve heard Jeff’s sister, Jill’s also does good burger). Caught the last train home and job done. And that’s my Lucerne post completed without one single mention of Kapellbrücke! Oh.

Four cantons and three weeks to go! : ) I will try to post another poem soon… have been writing but not publishing.

*Source: Swiss tourism in figures 2015