Friday, April 25 - Lucerne

We had a nice breakfast on the plane, croissant, banana, granola bar and juice. When we were descending in Zurich, it was very beautiful. It was misting rain but still pretty, so green. The airport was very big there. We found our driver with no problems. His name was John and he was very nice. The drive to the hotel was maybe an hour. Lots of turns through little villages that were just downright cute. The hotel is very nice. (http://www.hotel-montana.ch/e/index.htm)The view is amazing! Even the view from the toilet is good!

We then set out to explore the Old Town. It was really cute with one street after another filled with old shops and restaurants. We walked across a very old wooden bridge that had a scene painted on each truss. It was in German so of course we couldn't read it but it seemed to depict perhaps moments or events in Swiss history because they were all dated. We began to get hungry so we started looking for lunch. We ended up at a place next to the river. Troy had a pork chop and I had something like a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. They put Hawaiian toast on the bottom of a bowl, then ham and then poured very hot melted swiss cheese all over it. After we finished lunch we did more walking more into the modern part of town. We went to the tourist infor place trying to figure out how to call home. It is attached to the train station so we walked around in there. We needed to find a bathroom. It cost me two francs to use the bathroom. Then we decided to check out the grocery store there. Troy was thirsty and I was on the hunt for hair products. So we're just cruising the store comparing what is the same and what is different and, oh my God, we found horse meat there. I took a picture of Troy holding it! We couldn't get over that. We ended up buying a coke, a candybar, some mousse and a toothbrush. They didn't give us a bag. Guess these purchases didn't qualify. So I had to jam the mousse in one pocket and Troy put the toothbrush in his pocket. He ate a bit of the candy and then we put that in my other pocket. We decided we wanted to take a boat ride on the lake. We bought tickets for that and it ended up being a three hour tour--a three hour tour. It was beautiful, it really was but I was so tired that I kept dozing off. I was sitting inside in the main diningroom. Troy stayed outside most of the time, steadily snapping pictures. Every now and then I would go out to be with him, but I would be too cold and so I'd retreat back inside. Once that was over, we were hungry but we were also anxious to get our pictures online to be shared. We decided on McDonald's just because we could get online there. Once we finally accomplished that, we went back to the room for the night. The town is very pretty at night. Swans are a native bird here and they were everywhere on the lake. Under the moonlight, they glowed in the dark. Beautiful. We had a window open to let in the air (no a/c) and I woke up once just to go look at it. I never would have thought of this place as a vacation destination.

walked over 18,000 steps
approx 7.5 miles