Days 8 through 11

I believe when we last left you we were ready to move from the Berchtesgaden area of Germany over into Switzerland. We spent much of Day 8 stuck in the car due to very long traffic jams in Germany. Thankfully, the roads finally opened up after lunch, and we were able to test the capabilities of the new car. I managed to hit 135 mph on one unlimited speed section of the autobahn. It was quite fun, and a little scary, but I got my fix. It's something I'll never be able to try legally at home, so I'm glad we had the opportunity to do it here.

We meandered our way to Luzern via a town called St. Gallen, which is famous for its abbey and library. We made it to the abbey about half an hour before the library closed so we made a quick tour of the room to see some very old texts and to check out the nifty architecture in the library. They don't allow photos inside, but you can see a picture of the place here.

We left St. Gallen and continued on to Luzern, and got stuck in yet another traffic jam outside Zurich. It was quite an exhausting day of driving. However, once we finally made it to Luzern, we went straight to dinner at the Mexican restaurant that I'd been looking forward to trying ever since we started planning our trip. It was pretty good, and stupid expensive. 15 Francs for a tiny (maybe 6-8 ounces?) frozen margarita. Hmmph. We had them anyway. :)

The next day was rainy and cloudy, so we decided to go to the Swiss Transport Museum in Luzern, along with what must have been the entire school-aged population of the city. They had some neat displays of trains, cable cars, and ships, along with a couple of interesting airplanes. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the old town area of Luzern, and napping back in our hotel room, because we were both quite exhausted, and because I started getting the symptoms of a cold around then. We eventually went out for what turned out to be an excellent dinner. Jeff found a place with a good wine list, so we decided to try it. We found a great bottle of Bordeaux and both had lamb dishes to go with it.


The next morning, we walked up to the old city wall overlooking Luzern. We climbed up to the top and walked along the wall for a while, then climbed one of the towers for a good view of the city.



After that, we wandered back through some more of the old town area, then perused the wares at Bucherer for a while before getting back in the car to move to our next destination, Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

We've been blessed with great weather in Lauterbrunnen so far. When we arrived last night, the tops of the mountains surrounding us were in view, and several waterfalls are currently active. We are renting an apartment here, so we hit the little grocery shop in town for some supplies, then made dinner before taking a short walk up the valley towards Stechelberg before calling it a night. Here's the view from our apartment:


This morning we awoke to another mostly clear day, so we decided to take the cable cars from Stechelberg to the top of the Schilthorn to see the views. We were up in the clouds for part of the time, but other times things cleared up and we could see over the Alps. We meandered our way back down with strolls through Murren and Gimmelwald before coming back to our apartment, then we drove down into Interlaken to stock up on supplies at the supermarket for the rest of our stay here.






It's hard to believe that we only have six more full days here before we fly back home, but I suppose all good vacations must eventually come to an end, and we definitely miss our little pups. I suspect they are quite used to being spoiled and won't want to come back home with us, but they're going to have to. :)